“All right, knock it off,” said Quantrill. “Step back and get in line. Kwang-Sun, you be in charge of the grenades. Give one to everybody as they move up in line.”
Kwang-Sun manhandled soldiers away from the boxes. “Get back! One at a time.”
The men grumbled, but did as they were told, forming a queue.
“Take it easy,” said Quantrill. “You’ll all be fighting the ghouls soon enough. No point in wearing yourselves out fighting each other.”
“That’s all we got,” said Kwang-Sun, passing out the last grenade.
“Listen up, people,” said Quantrill. “Everyone with a grenade, stand over here.” She motioned to her left. “The rest of you, get into the SUVs and prepare to take off. Right after we detonate the grenades, we’re out of here.”
Taking Kwang-Sun with her, Quantrill led the soldiers with the grenades down the street toward the oncoming hordes of ghouls, which were marching toward them a hundred-odd feet away.
“We’re gonna blow them up when they’re about thirty feet away,” said Quantrill, coming to a halt in the street.
“What if the grenades blow craters in the blacktop?” asked Kwang-Sun. “How will we be able to drive over it?”
“The SUVs have four-wheel drive. We can handle bumpy terrain.”
“I don’t know if they can handle a crater though. Might be pretty deep.”
“Then we’ll drive over the piles of dead bodies in it. You worry too much.”
Kwang-Sun knitted his brow.
“That’s why your forehead looks like a cockleshell,” added Quantrill.
“Cockleshell?” muttered Kwang-Sun.
At least a hundred rows of the walking dead slogged down the street toward Quantrill and her bombers.
“On my count,” said Quantrill. “On three, let ’em have it.”
“Can’t wait,” said one of the men, a burly guy with a bald head and three days’ growth of beard, brandishing his grenade.
“Steady now,” said Quantrill, watching the progress of the ghouls. “Get ready. On the count of three, pull your pins, wait five seconds, then lob your grenades.”
The first row of the ragtag mob of ghouls emerged clearly into view now as they lurched down the street.
Halverson could make out their mouths hanging open, drooling.
“Damn, they’re ugly,” said Kwang-Sun.
The creatures moaned out of the depths of their maws.
“Ready,” said Quantrill. “One. Two. Three.”
As one, the soldiers plucked out the pins from their grenades, waited five seconds, and lobbed the bombs at the traipsing ghouls.
Quantrill and her squad covered their ears as the grenades’ fulminations rent the air and rocked the pavement. Smoke billowed across the street and the desert flatlands, blanketing the creatures with thick grey clouds.
The three SUVs drove up to Quantrill.
CHAPTER 31
“She’s a real ballbuster, huh?” said Chogan on the passenger side of the lead SUV, as Halverson sat in the driver’s seat and steered toward Quantrill to pick her up.
“She’ll do anything to stay in power,” said Halverson.
“She could kill us without batting an eye.”
Halverson sped toward Quantrill, who was standing under roiling smoke that was wafting toward her from the site of the explosions.
The three SUVs screeched to a halt. Quantrill and her squad piled into them. Quantrill and McLellan climbed into Halverson’s backseat. Kwang-Sun ducked into the second SUV.
Halverson couldn’t make out the condition of the ghouls thanks to the smoke cloaking them. He hoped most of the things shambling on the street had been killed by the bombs.
“Wait till the smoke clears,” said Quantrill. “We want to see where we’re going.”
Halverson sat in the driver’s seat with the engine idling, the shifter in park. As the maelstrom of smoke lifted, a scene of devastation unfolded before him. It was enough to turn the strongest stomach into mush.
Hundreds of corpses sprawled in a massive crater blasted out of the macadam and earth by the grenades. Many of the bodies had been torn to pieces by the explosion. Decapitated bodies as well as limbless bodies were the order of the day. Not all the flesh eaters were dead, though. Several were writhing at the bottom of the crater. Even worse, others were still halting around in singed ragged clothing.
A sixtyish male creature wearing what was left of a safari jacket was plodding through the debris without any arms. The bomb-blasted safari jacket was slipping off the ghoul’s shoulders. Half his face was stove in.
Other amputees and double amputees in scorched rags maundered around the crater amongst the congeries of motionless cadavers.
“Let’s go,” said Quantrill, “before they regroup and block our path.”
Halverson shifted into drive and made for the lip of the crater. The swirling smoke filtered the moon- and starlight into a gauzy haze.
He strove to avoid the heaps of corpses, seeking firm ground for the SUV’s wheels to find purchase.
“Lower the windows, so we can pick off any of the ghouls that come at us,” said Quantrill.
Chogan and the others in the vehicle pushed plastic buttons in their armrests that buzzed down their windows.
Halverson kept his window closed. He didn’t want to have to shoot and drive at the same time. He had his hands full trying to negotiate a clear path through the bombed-out terrain.
A lone zombie here and there stumbled toward the car. Quantrill and her soldiers blew away the creatures’ heads.
By the time Halverson reached the end of the crater, he could see ghouls herding around the undamaged asphalt, lured by the cacophony of the explosions.
The SUV came to an abrupt halt.
“What are you stopping for?” said Quantrill.
“We’re stuck on something,” said Halverson.
He gave the vehicle more gas. The wheels ground around in futility.
A middle-aged ghoul staggered toward Chogan’s window. The white-haired female’s jaw hung down suspended in front of her throat by a shank of putrescent flesh. Her fetid stench carried on the breeze toward him. Two of her broken ribs protruded from her mutilated chest with sharp tips like the horns of a bull. Her slacks had fallen off, revealing her torn panties. A three-inch length of grey intestine was drooping out of her necrotic abdomen.
Chogan pulled a face. “How about a gun over here,” he called over his shoulder.
The ghoul continued hitching toward him, nearing his open window.
“I could really use a gun,” said Chogan, his nerves fraying.
A hand reached toward him from the backseat and offered him a Sig Sauer P226 automatic.
Chogan snagged the pistol, double-tapped the ghoul’s forehead, and blew the back of its skull out. The ghoul keeled over and landed on its protruding ribs.
“We can’t stay here,” said Quantrill. “We have to get moving!”
Halverson shifted into reverse to see if he could get any traction with the wheels, which seemed to be slipping on something.
A teenage zombie with one ear and half a nose stumbled toward the SUV and extended a withered hand toward Quantrill.
Quantrill trained her Glock over her open window’s steel sill and blew the creature’s eye out. One Ear slewed around and dropped dead.
Halverson managed to drive about a foot backward. He threw the shifter into drive and crushed the gas pedal. The rear wheels spun and fishtailed at first then gripped and plowed forward just as two of the walking dead staggered in front of the vehicle.
Halverson crashed into them. The car knocked one body to the side. The other body landed on the hood.
The fortysomething male ghoul on the hood sported a bushy black beard streaked with grey. The ghoul slid along the hood and stuck its rotting face toward the windshield.
“Get it off,” said Chogan.
He drew a bead on the ghoul, tempted to let loose a round through the windsh
ield.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Halverson.
He swung a sharp left.
Slipping off the hood Black Beard tried to grab a windshield wiper to hang on. The blade snapped off in his hand. He slid over the right fender and out of Halverson’s view.
Halverson veered right and straightened out the SUV.
“The longer we hang around here, the more ghouls will show up,” said Quantrill. “They’re already regrouping.”
Halverson accelerated.
But something wasn’t right.
CHAPTER 32
Halverson could feel something dragging back the SUV and pulling the steering wheel to the right as he stomped on the gas pedal. It wasn’t the same impediment that had haltered them earlier, he could tell. That snag hadn’t pulled at the steering wheel like this one was doing.
Three of the walking dead were staggering toward the vehicle out of the wisps of residual smoke that lingered in the surroundings and that spiraled upward from the ground in narrow columns thanks to the grenade explosions.
The steering wheel was, in fact, drawing him toward the creatures.
“Why are you trying to run the things over?” said Quantrill. “Let’s just get out of here. Forget them!”
“I can’t straighten the steering wheel,” said Halverson, straining to do just that.
He could hear the fitful popping of automatic weapons’ fire behind him emanating from the two SUVs in tow. They, too, had encountered the walking dead, it seemed.
“We’re fucked,” said Chogan. “We’re gonna go around in circles like this while the ghouls close in on us.”
“Stick your head out the window and see if anything’s pulling on our right side,” said Halverson.
Chogan poked his head out his open window and peered down, squinching his eyes in the wind that rushed past his face. He cursed.
“What is it?” said Halverson.
“That ghoul that was on our hood is stuck in the wheel well and blocking the wheel from turning.”
Halverson hit the brakes. “We need to clear it.”
Chogan heaved a sigh. “I guess I’m elected.”
He flung open the passenger-side door and darted out to the right front fender.
McLellan leaned out a backseat window, drew a bead on a nearby ghoul, and plugged it in the head before the creature could light into Chogan.
A clutch of the walking dead twenty-plus feet away was schlepping toward Chogan from out of the wavering veil of smoke.
“I can’t hold these things off all day,” said McLellan, firing another round from his FN 5.7 at the ghouls.
Chogan stooped over the creature wedged between the right front tire and the wheel well. The creature was still alive, he noticed. It opened its bearded jaws and tried to snap at him as he neared it. Chogan reared back.
Black Beard could not get at Chogan. It twisted its body and writhed but could not extricate itself from its predicament.
Chogan drew his pistol and blew away Black Beard’s head. The occipital bone and brain pulp exploded onto the dirt.
Now all Chogan had to do was haul the corpse out of the wheel well. Easier said than done, he could see as he inspected the cadaver’s entanglement between the rubber tire treads and the steel fender.
He hated touching the wasted, rancid flesh of the ghoul. There was nothing else for it. It was the only way he could extricate the corpse to free the wheel.
He yanked on one of Black Beard’s arms. He was surprised to watch the arm rip out of the shoulder socket with a grating, sucking sound as he hauled on the desiccated hand. He stumbled backward, the arm clutched in his hands, and all but fell on his ass. He noticed worms squiggling out of the torn flesh of the upper arm.
He threw away the limb in disgust. “Fucking-a.”
McLellan stuck his head out the window. “Stop fooling around out there.”
He trained his FN 5.7 on a thirtysomething male ghoul with close-cropped dyed blond hair and a grimacing, rotting face that canted off center. Blood leaked from the corners of its mouth, indicating it had fed recently. Blondie’s forehead already had a crack in it, but apparently its brain had not suffered any damage during the injury.
Clad in a black vest and matching slacks, Blondie was trudging within ten feet of Chogan when McLellan put a bullet into its medulla oblongata, which flew out the back of the creature’s head with a fragment of hairy skull and slammed into the dirt.
Blondie dropped dead in its tracks.
Chogan strode back to Black Beard’s one-armed corpse that was hitched with the wheel well.
“Grab it by its head,” said McLellan.
Chogan shrugged. Might work, he decided. He pulled a face. He hated the idea of latching onto the creature’s grotesque, bullet-fragmented head.
Sneering, he wrapped his hands around the head, gripped it under its jaw and around the nape of its neck, making sure not to cut his hand on any broken bones in the fractured skull, braced his feet in the earth, and pulled with all his might on the head. The neck was holding together better than the arm socket had, he noticed in frustration.
He also noticed that Black Beard’s brains were oozing out of its skull onto his trouser leg. Chogan released the creature’s head and backed away from it. He glanced down at the brains on his jeans with disgust.
“What’s wrong?” said McLellan.
“I got its brains on my pants.”
“And?”
“And aren’t they contagious?” said Chogan in irritation.
“Not unless they get inside an open wound.”
Scared to wipe them off his pant leg and get them on his hands, wounded or not, he left the brains alone and returned to Black Beard. He spotted where the brains were leaking out the back of Black Beard’s cracked head and maneuvered himself into a position so as to avoid getting them on him. Which wasn’t easy.
He had to assume a position that was awkward, to say the least, and that was exerting a good deal of stress on his back as he once again gripped Black Beard’s head under the chin and at the nape of the neck.
Gingerly so as not to strain his back, Chogan yanked on the head, keeping a wary eye on the dripping brains.
A raven called loudly behind him, startling him, causing him to release his hold on the head.
The raven swooped out of the eddying miasma of grenade smoke in the night sky and down onto a zombie that was trudging toward Chogan from behind. The carrion eater perched on the walking corpse’s shoulder, plucked one of the ghoul’s ears in its beak, and tore off the necrotic ear. By the time the zombie flailed its arms at the raven to shoo the predator away from its one-eared head, the raven was already flying away to find a site where it could touch down and savor its meal.
Chogan shook his head in amazement. He didn’t even know ravens flew at night. Well, why not? he decided. If the dead can walk, why can’t ravens fly in the middle of the night? A gunshot snapped him out of his thoughts.
McLellan had shot the zombie in the eye and put it down.
“I don’t know how much longer I can hold them off,” said McLellan. “Stop screwing the pooch.”
Chogan spat in contempt. “Why don’t you do this?”
“I’m guarding you.”
With that McLellan drew a bead on a redheaded female ghoul whose neck was impaled on a broken tree limb. He shot the creature as it was lolloping toward Chogan. The ghoul’s head snapped back as the round slammed into it.
Somebody must have tried to kill the thing with the branch at some point, decided Chogan, watching the redhead fall. The creature must have traveled a long ways, since there weren’t many trees in the desert.
“What about I guard you, and you do this?” said Chogan.
“Just get on with it,” said McLellan.
Chogan regripped Black Beard’s head and wrenched it with a vengeance. Chogan’s torn rotator cuff, which had never fully healed after he had torn it the better part of a year ago, was starting to bother him. He could
n’t do this much longer.
With relief he felt the corpse loosening from its crammed position. Chogan jerked harder on the head, despite the soreness in his rotator cuff, and removed Black Beard’s mangled corpse from the wheel well.
Black Beard plunked onto the ground.
Chogan dragged the corpse clear of the SUV’s wheel just as a three-hundred-pound stocky zombie with long silvery hair that resembled a bird’s nest on its head lumbered within five feet of him, its withered hands groping for him. The ghoul was dressed in a postal uniform with grey shorts and a powder blue pin-striped button-down shirt that had its tails hanging out over the grimy, shredded shorts.
The ghoul sneered at Chogan and moved in for the kill, its white-filmed brown eyes fixed on him.
CHAPTER 33
McLellan wasted the rotund ghoul with a single shot through its Eustachian tube. Brains splattered out the other side of the creature’s head along with spalls of skull as the creature toppled to the ground.
A gaggle of ghouls manifested themselves like specters out of the tendrils of smoke shrouding the cratered landscape and hobbled forward with their characteristic herky-jerky movements.
Chogan pegged back to the SUV, scooted onto his seat next to Halverson, and slammed the door behind him.
Halverson picked up on Kwang-Sun’s vehicle pulling up beside him.
“What’s the holdup?” asked Kwang-Sun out his SUV’s driver’s-side open window.
“We got stuck,” answered Halverson.
Halverson glanced in the rearview mirror. “Where’s the third car?”
He heard a drumbeat of automatic weapons’ fire in the distance behind him. Bloodcurdling screams punctuated the rattling gunfire.
“I don’t know,” said Kwang-Sun, craning his neck around to peer over his shoulder. “I thought they were right behind us.”
“We should go back. They need our help.”
“We can’t spare the time,” said Quantrill from the backseat.
“We can’t leave them behind.”
“Hooyah,” said Chogan. “I’m a marine. Nobody gets left behind.”
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