And that’s why they needed airpower so desperately. A few properly aimed cluster bombs had proved capable of breaking up these huge throngs. Napalm was even better. One MK 77 could roast an amazing number of dead-heads. It would also give them light to shoot by. Shooting in the dark was particularly hellish. During the day, they had been able to make almost every bullet count. They could also kill at much greater ranges, something they couldn’t do at night. In the dark, they had to wait until the creatures were practically in their laps.
“We need more flares,” he said to himself, looking up at the empty sky. While he was searching in vain for a plane, he heard the first cry of: “Friendlies coming in! We’re human so don’t shoot.”
“Shut the hell up for Christ’s sake!” someone in the next company cried. The 3rd Battalion came staggering through the stream and were hit with a nasty whispering barrage of curses and accusations of cowardice.
Ross didn’t have time to vent his frustration. He needed information. “How many were there?” he asked the first man across. Up close he discovered it was not a man at all, it was a boy of maybe fifteen. He was ghost-white and shivering. “It’s alright, you’re safe. Now, tell me, how many were there?”
“Millions,” the kid whispered, his wide, terrified eyes unable to focus.
As much as Ross wanted to slap some sense into him, he refrained. “Alright. Good. Keep going.” He asked the same question of the next few men and received the same sort of odd and unnerving answers.
Finally, he came across an officer who gave him the bad news. “A hell of a lot. They’re sort of balled-up. Like a fist. Most of the line could have held for a while, but the center-left crumbled. We threw our reserves in, but it was too late. Too many of the men are on the verge of cracking.” This last part came out in a creaky, secretive whisper.
“Too many of the men aren’t even men,” Ross said in reply. “Tell me, are they close?”
“We lit some fires to confuse them, but yeah. Maybe a few hundred yards back. Good luck, man.”
He was gone. After him followed haggard soldiers, baby-faced farm boys, and city dwellers who were far out of their depth. After them came the dead. From afar it sounded as though some immense beast was eating the forest. The smaller trees were enveloped and crushed under the squirming bodies as branches snapped and bushes were ground under foot. Up close, the sound was a thousand times worse. Up close, Ross could hear the horde breathing; it made him want to run away screaming as fast as he could.
But he held his ground, hunkering low, refusing to move or even to swallow.
There was total silence along the entire line. No one wanted the horde to center on them and so, the long thin line huddled in fright, hoping and praying for some miracle that would turn the awful creatures away. Ross looked for his miracle in the heavens in the form of a flight of B2 Spirits. All it would take was just one to clear the other side of the river for a square mile.
Please God, he mouthed and was still searching the empty sky when a rifle fired. His first reaction was to breathe a sigh of relief. The shot had come from far up the line and as expected, the thousands of beasts suddenly swung in that direction.
Foxtrot was going to get it bad, but that didn’t mean Ross’ Echo Company was going to get off scot-free. There’d be a little overlap, though probably not something they couldn’t handle. Already there was a splash to his left as one of the dead fell into the river. More followed. Still his soldiers didn’t move. The lifeless monsters kept shifting north as more rifles began to pop, pop, pop upstream.
Why stop them? each of the soldiers was thinking. Why not let them go on and kill someone else?
Ross was thinking the same thing and had been all night when an unexpected answer filtered through his relief: Because the line won’t hold. It wouldn’t, he realized. No miracle was coming to save them and without one there’d be nothing to stop the zombies from overrunning the soldiers of Foxtrot, perhaps killing them all. And if that happened, then what?
“We’d have to run again,” he whispered. “And again and again.” And each time their numbers would be fewer and fewer. His stomach rolled over, nausea creeping through his guts like a huge oily slug. He knew what he had to do. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, fear gripping him hard. He had to take a deep, deep breath to spit out the next order.
“Rifles up, Echo! It’s time to fight.”
2-2:03 a.m.
New Rochelle, New York
The building was cold and forbidding, but not so cold and forbidding as the night, where there were howls and moans coming from almost every direction. Everyone was staring at Katherine Pennock and the three Blackhawk crew members.
It seemed unbelievable that they were being asked to go back through the deadly gauntlet they had just escaped from.
The pilot was a forty-year old reservist with a beak of a nose that jutted almost as far out as his Adam’s apple, which was oddly sharp and looked like he’d gotten a clam stuck sideways in his throat. His name was Tim Bryan and he was as brave as the next man, but the idea of going back undercut him badly.
“Maybe we should all go. We can leave the gear here and I can land the bird right over there. The, uh, blonde chick is right; there’s plenty of room.” The words had run out of his mouth in one long stream and when it dried up, all he saw were heads shaking. He wasn’t the only one who had been unnerved by the helter-skelter flight through the neighborhood.
General Axelrod looked at Bryan with disgust and even made something of an ugh sound as he turned from the nervous pilot. “I’m having trouble with this. Did we come all this way for nothing?” he demanded of Thuy. “I thought you were some sort of genius.”
Thuy was lost in thought, her mind harkening back five days before when she had been trapped in a similar building. It had been a nightmare that she would never have gotten out of if it hadn’t been for Deckard—and now that he was dead, she was wondering if she went inside, whether she would walk out again. She had been somewhat oblivious to the entire conversation until the word “genius” entered her consciousness.
Before she could open her mouth, Anna jumped in, “We’re wasting valuable time. You have to make them get the helicopter, General. It’s our only chance. And with the fire going, they should make it easy. If you’re worried about the President, we can go north or…”
“No,” Thuy said, her soft voice cutting across Anna. “Why on earth are any of you listening to her? She’s a criminal. She’s a murderer on a scale that dwarfs even Hitler.”
“I have a pardon,” Anna hissed. “And it wasn’t even me who did all this. It was Eng, and you know that. But none of that changes the fact that this was a waste of a trip!”
Thuy snorted derisively and reached out her small hand, laying it on the dark glass wall. “This is a bio-research facility for a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company. Do you really think that a man like Stephan Kipling would forget something as elementary as having a back-up generator in case of a power failure?”
The thought really hadn’t crossed Anna’s mind, and judging how the others seemed to wilt in relief, they hadn’t consider either. “Then what are we waiting for?” Sergeant Carlton asked, moving toward the door. “Let’s get in there.”
“Hold on,” the colonel demanded, easily pulling the man back with one hand. “We have to think about defending this place. If we start smashing holes in the doors, it’ll give the dead an easy ingress site. Is there roof access around back?”
Thuy, who had never been to the rear of the building, replied with a shrug. Anna did as well. She assumed that was where the garbage bins were and why on earth would she want to visit them?
The general sent out two teams to find a way inside and while they were gone, Thuy went and stood off to the side, staring across the parking lot. She should have been thinking of finding the cure, instead she couldn’t stop thinking about that last gunshot of Deckard’s. It had come down at an angle, probably from the third floor. Could he have fo
ught his way clear from there? How many bullets had he had?
Deckard had started with seven magazines, but there was no way of knowing how many times he’d shot his weapon. He’d been firing far too quickly to count. She only knew that when he fired the shot that had stopped Eng, he had to have been scraping the bottom of the barrel, ammo wise.
She tried to convince herself that he had been able to hide from the huge mob of undead, except every time she closed her eyes, she could hear Jaimee Lynn Burke singing out in that sickly-sweet voice of hers: “Doctor Leeeee. I cun smell you, Dr. Lee. An’ I cun smell that man, an’ that woman. I cun smell all of you.” As a zombie, little Jaimee Lynn was terrifying.
All alone, fighting against so many, Deckard hadn’t had a chance in…
“Dr. Lee?” It was Sergeant Carlton taking her by the hand. “You’re the lightest. You should be the top person. Come on. It’ll be easy.”
“Hmm? Top person? I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
He pointed up at the second-floor window. “There’s no way in without breaking a window so we decided we’ll go in through that one. You’re going to be the top of a human ladder.”
Thuy’s mouth fell open.
3–2:17 a.m.
The Walton Facility, New York
Jaimee Lynn Burke was far from satisfied. Hours before, she had gorged on the army girl until she began burping blood and chunks of tasty little gristle-like morsels that went down just as well the second time as they had the first. But that was before all the running around she had been forced to do. Setting up a moving trap in a partially collapsed building was not the easiest thing to do, especially when her only help were a bunch of zombies.
“They’s worserer than a busload of kiddie-gartners,” she said, sucking the marrow from the humerus of the man that had been killed in the west parking lot. If she had been told that man was her father, she would have angrily denied it. Her father most certainly had a face and hands, as well as two legs, and the ravaged corpse had none of those things.
Still, there had been something vaguely familiar about the body. There had been a southern dirt flavor to him that the man she had picked over on the third floor had lacked. He had been the biggest disappointment of all. She had done everything she could to get to him while he was still fighting, but there had been hundreds of the big, stupid zombies in her way and they had eaten him down to his boots.
And all the others had somehow gotten away. She stood in the parking lot, one end of the long bone stuck in her mouth, making it look strangely like a pipe. “Wut’s that way?” she asked one of the zombies moaning by. “Hey, stoopid-head!” It kept going.
“He prolly didn’t know nothin’ no-how,” she groused. “But that other one might.” She wandered to where her little ones had treed Lieutenant Eng of the People’s Liberation Army. She had eight little ones left, all of them horrible demons. They were a ragged, deformed lot, missing so many pieces of themselves that between them, they didn’t make more than two and a half children.
At least they listened and had some smarts.
“Jammee, he smell,” one told her.
“On top he do, but unner-neath, he gonna be good,” Jaimee Lynn reassured her. “You just wait.” She looked up at Eng, dying in the tree, her nose wrinkling at the smell of bleach. He had coated himself in it. “When y’all gonna drop on down, Chinaman? Ain’t you tired yet?”
Eng wasn’t tired. He was well past tired and was on whatever stage was two levels beyond exhaustion. His head swam and his right lung had begun to rattle when he tried to drag in futile sips of air; his left lung had already filled with blood. “Go away,” he whispered.
“Okay, sure,” Jaimee Lynn lied. “But first y’all gotta tell me what’s that way. All them people went an’ flew off that way.” She pointed with the gnawed end of the bone to the south.
“I don’t know. Just go away.”
The Chinaman was being difficult. Jaimee Lynn decided to sweeten the bargain. “I’ll send my friends away iffin you tell me. Y’all cun climb on down and scoot, you know? Y’all cun escape. How’s that sound?”
It sounded to him like a bad lie. Then again, it also sounded like she was stuck on the question. With great difficulty, he lifted his head and stared off in the direction the Blackhawk had flown. As far as he could tell they had gone almost directly south.
Gasping, he told Jaimee Lynn, “They’re going to New York. You should go, too. Lots of people. You could eat all of them.”
Her black-demon eyes grew wide. “Is that close on by?”
In order to answer her, Eng had to drag air into his one lung as if he was sucking it from a straw with one end in the bottom of a nearly empty pool. “It’s not far. Only a few miles away. You could…be there in no time.” He drew in another long breath, picturing the city and the little apartment he had rented north of it when the Com-cell project had been located at the old R&K research facility in New Rochelle. It struck him like a thunderbolt—that was where Dr. Lee was going.
Dying as he was, his mind had been sluggish and uncaring; now, it spooled-up, picking out the clues: the single helicopter, the utter lack of support, the fact that they had sent a useless hick like John Burke in with them. What did it all mean? Slowly, it dawned on him.
“They’re on her own,” he wheezed. “They’re going to New Rochelle. To make a cure or a…” He was suddenly too dizzy to speak. As he lay on the branch gasping, he wondered why he cared. There was going to be no cure for his punctured lung and internal bleeding. He was going to drown in his own blood sometime in the next hour and there was nothing that would change that.
“Y’all almost done gonna fall?” Jaimee Lynn asked. “Y’all’s takin’ forever.” Around her were the beastly half-children, many of them so mauled it was a wonder they could still stand. Seeing them gave Eng an awful, evil idea. There was a cure for a punctured lung, it came with a price, however.
Taking the deepest breath he could manage, he hugged the heavy branch with all his strength and let one of his legs dangle. The little beasts went nuts, leaping for his foot that hung just out of reach. They were all either too small or lacked the necessary muscles or limbs to jump.
Even lanky Jaimee Lynn couldn’t reach the inviting flesh. After jumping to her highest, she stood back, a sneer on her blood-caked face. She needed a ladder, or a boost, or a step stool. The nasty sneer turned into an evil grin at the idea of a step-stool. She grabbed the nearest kid and threw him down on the ground. Two more were thrown on top of him and, once she was standing on the little pile, she could reach Eng’s foot.
Beneath the strong stench of bleach was the sweet smell of flesh and clean blood. She attacked the foot, clawing at it with both hands and nearly managed to pull Eng down. He clawed the branch like a cat and held on, and when her hands slipped, he pulled himself up.
“Perfect,” he whispered, feeling blood run down into his sock.
“Git on down here!” Jaimee Lynn raged, flinging her dad’s humerus at him. Eng only smiled and held on, wondering how long it would be before the Com-cells started mending his lung. He knew that he would be infectious in two hours and so struck with pain and inner fury that he wouldn’t care about his wounds.
What he needed were painkillers. They’d keep him aware enough to find Thuy and make her cure him.
“You,” he said to Jaimee Lynn. “Do you want blood? Real blood? Dr. Lee’s blood? I can get her for you, but you have to help me.”
For some reason, Jaimee Lynn harbored a strange hungering hate for Dr. Lee. She was a treat that was somehow always just out of reach. Sort of like the Chinaman’s leg had been. “You know’d where she went?”
“Yes. A building. It’s not far. Not more than thirty-five miles away.” Jaimee Lynn’s black eyes went to squints. She didn’t know how far a mile was anymore, but she knew it was far. “It’s okay,” Eng went on, seeing the look. “I can drive us. I just need a few things first and then you’ll have all the blood you want.”
Chapter 4
1-3:09 a.m.
Grafton, Massachusetts
First Lieutenant Troy Ross decided on his own to make the fight for the little river the next great battle of the war. When his men hadn’t budged, he simply picked out a target and fired his rifle. As expected, the undead creatures that had been slogging up the river immediately pivoted and came at him.
“You’re in it now, boys,” he shouted. “Let’s make it count.” Most of his men cursed under their breath, while a few whined, their spirit almost broken. “Shut your mouths and fight! The suburbs of Boston are only eighteen miles away. After that is the ocean and it’s a long-ass swim to France. So, shoulder your rifles. We fight here and we fight now!”
Not bad for his first rah-rah speech as commander, he thought. His men continued to grumble, and that was okay; soldiers always complained. All he cared about was that his men did seem to be settling down and, as the dead started clawing at the muddy bank, they fired their guns, filling the stream with wretched bodies.
Ross was not content with the battle centering on a few companies. After telling one of his staff sergeants to hold the line until he got back, he jogged downstream, passing four companies of cowering men. There were zombies pushing past all four, heading right for his Echo Company.
“And,” he raised his gun and fired at one that was practically on the eastern bank. “Now, they’re not.” Just like before, the surging beasts turned to the closest human sound.
“What the hell!” the commanding officer of the company hissed as he raced over. “Who fired their gun? Who was it?”
A hundred furious men pointed at Ross, who raised a hand. The C.O. was a captain, which was neither here nor there to Ross. With death threatening at every turn, the penalty for insubordination, or whatever the man would threaten him with, seemed inconsequential.
War of the Undead Day 5 Page 5