by Smith, S. L.
There was a sudden rush of zombies to either side of the vehicle. “Don’t forget to plug up the underside, Justin,” he called over the vehicle. He plunged the katana into the heads that were trying to squeeze through the narrowing space. He dropped to his knees to do likewise to creatures that might be crawling under the vehicle.
He was suddenly face to face with a zombie just emerging from under the Escalade. Its teeth snapped at him. Its cold, fetid breath covered his face. He had no room to maneuver his sword in the tight space. He tried crawling backward, but the foot of his boot wedged between two shifting boulders. He was about to add his own body to fill the breach in their wall.
Suddenly, the zombie’s nose lengthened as though he had just told a lie. The skin of the nose stretched and then tore clean off, as the sharpened tip of a frog-gigging pole cleaved through the thing’s skull.
“I gotcha, bro.” Justin said. “Get out of there. I got this.”
Isherwood took a moment to rub his forehead where the tip of the pole had almost notched him. He easily dislodged his boot now that his panic had passed. He regained his footing and sheathed his sword. He picked up the remaining poles and loaded them onto the platform, while Justin finished plugging the holes around his vehicle.
He was back on the platform in time to see the swarm’s focus shift back to Chet and the platform. Simultaneously, his radio chirped to life. He had dropped it on the floor of the platform in his rush to alert Justin. It wasn’t Padre’s voice as he hoped. It took him a second to place the woman’s voice.
In that moment’s hesitation, Chet grabbed the radio from him. “Gill? Is that you? Where are you?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” the radio squawked. “You’re supposed to say ‘over,’ boy-o. Over. click-shh.”
“Right, sure, ‘over’ – well, now ‘over’ just yet …” Chet said.
Isherwood forcefully took the radio back from the blushing young man and scowled at him. “This is Isherwood. Where are you? Over.”
“Knocking on the front door. Turning in. You better be ready for us. Over. click-shh.”
“Yeah, a little early, but I think we’re ready. There’s still several hundred of these things looking at us and the entrance to the canyon is still wide open. Drive right past the first canyon and don’t dawdle. We’ll probably divide your swarm between the first two canyons but that will be fine. Any questions? Over.”
“Hoskins here.” The radio crackled before Gill could answer. “I’ll be waiting for you at the second grinder. Over. click-shh.”
“It’s a date,” Gill answered. “That sound in the background. That was the zombie food processor, wasn’t it? Gross. Don’t answer. We’ll see you in a moment. Over.”
CHAPTER FIVE: SLIPPERY SLOPE
Justin stood atop the ladder, trying to scrape his boots along the underside of the platform. “Big ol’ puddle starting to form down by the outlet. Goop spilling out like something out of The Shining, man.”
“Just needs to hold out a little longer.” Isherwood said. He didn’t know if he was trying to reassure Justin, himself, or the machine below them.
“She’s still purring like a kitten,” Chet said as something clanged beneath them. His thoughts had clearly been elsewhere ever since Padre’s Humvee had driven past the mouth of their canyon, honking as it went. The conflicting distractions had caused some of the horde in the first canyon to turn around, but it had been simple enough to draw their attention back to the platform and conveyor belt below.
They had watched as a good portion of the second horde had followed Padre into the second canyon. A good portion also veered off into their canyon. As Isherwood watched, a thought suddenly slapped him across his face. The first horde should’ve gone to the second canyon. Then, the first group wouldn’t’ve distracted the second group.
“Idiot,” he said pressing the heel of his hand into his forehead.
“What?” Justin asked, and Isherwood explained his error. “Yup,” Justin winced. “That would’ve been the thing to do.”
“But that just means less for other group, right?” Chet asked.
“Right,” Justin frowned. “We’re up to our eyeballs in … well, eyeballs. But your girlfriend, she’s on Easy Street.”
“She’s not my …”
“Whatever,” Justin said.
Their clothes were slowly becoming saturated by the low-hanging mist welling up from the grinder. Justin picked up a couple poles, his trusty frog gigging pole and another he had found lying around behind the platform. He handed one to Isherwood, and said “Come on, let’s check this out.”
The two men leaned over the railing to inspect the grinders. As they did, they were dimly aware of footsteps clanging down the ladder. “Gonna check on the others,” Chet yelled to them. Isherwood grunted an acknowledgment, but he had become quickly absorbed in the inspection. There were piles of large, undigested bone fragments lining the inner walls of the grinder. These would need to be pushed into the mouth of the grinder or it would clog. Somehow, they also saw, an entire living torso had managed to wedge itself in the corner of the grinder. The teeth of the grinder had eaten a huge swath of the creature’s chest away. Only the back of its ribs were left between its left shoulder and its belly button. It was stuck in a rapid never-ending loop of reaching forward towards the men on the platform and getting thrown back by grinder.
*****
Chet made sure that none of the zombies noticed him leaving the platform. He tapped himself making a quick inventory of his weapons. He did this several times. It was a nervous twitch that had followed him into the apocalypse. When he was nervous before, he would absent-mindedly check his pockets for his wallet, phone, car keys, and pen. He didn’t have much use for any of these things now. His necessities had completely changed. He had traded his wallet for a 9mm sidearm and his keys for a large hunting knife. He tapped these distractedly as well as his extra ammo, as he jogged around the gravel mountain that stood between the first and the second canyon. It was fifty or so yards around the base of the mountain. The mountains were stacked very steeply, rising almost as high as they were wide.
He was jogging at an easy pace, trying to appear almost casual. That changed suddenly when he heard her scream.
*****
No one would have suspected beforehand that it would have been the Humvee, they had borrowed from the National Guard armory, that would have had the most fragile tires. With a sudden jerk, the Humvee’s left front tire had blown out. They were only about halfway down the canyon when it happened. Padre was able to coax the vehicle the rest of the way down the canyon, but at a much slower pace. By the time he had slid the Humvee into its appointed parking spot to the left of the grinder, the swarm was nipping at the rear bumper.
“That’s far enough!” Gill yelled out as she and Holly spilled out the backseat of the vehicle. “Seal the gaps,” she barked at Padre and Lee. The two men obliged the ladies without protest in the sudden panic. Hoskins, for his part, had stayed on the platform and was yelling obscenities into the thick crowd of zombies, encouraging the swarm to stagger onto the conveyor belt.
Lee Majors caught glimpses now and then of the girls plying their trade against the oncoming swarm. It reminded him of when he had first met them. They had been blazing a trail through the swarm of all swarms at the intersection of major interstates in the heart of Baton Rouge. But he was still scared for them. “Come on,” he called to them. “We’ll just seal the gaps with them.” It was like a bad dream. No matter how loud he screamed they couldn’t hear or wouldn’t listen. Padre was also calling to them, too. There were just too many. The dead were pressing in from every side.
Suddenly, the amphitheater of echoing, moaning zombies fell silent. They all did, live or dead. Somebody was screaming along the gravel wall on the far side of the grinder. Gill was just yanking her knife out of the temple of a zombie. She looked up suddenly to see Chet’s face from across the canyon. He had locked eyes on her for just a moment before
turning back around. He was scrambling up the loose gravel sides of the mountain on the opposite side of the canyon. He was screaming as he went, likely due to the pain of scraping his whole body against the sharp rocks. “Go,” he yelled to Gill and Holly. “Get behind cover.”
Chet wasn’t able to grab a firm perch along the steep sides. Besides that, the gravel was eroding quickly beneath him. He could feel the skin tearing away in sheets from his bare hands as he scrambled madly upward. He might lurch upward five or so inches, but then fall backward another six. It was only with great pain that he gained even an inch. Even then, he was moving farther and farther into the canyon, away from safety. He was basically climbing on a vertical treadmill. He wouldn’t be able to keep it up for much longer. He could feel their hands brushing against the soles of his boots. Another inch, and they’d be pulling at his boots. It would be nothing then for them to yank him down, down into a hundred snapping jaws.
“Chet!” Gill called out. She was already safely on the platform. “Climb, you imbecile. Climb!” She was crying. Tears were making clean lines down her blood and dust-splattered face. They were all yelling now. “Just freakin’ hold on, stupid.” The redhead grabbed one of the Henry rifles off Padre’s back and started firing into the crowd just beneath Chet. She thanked God it wasn’t a shotgun as the first dead head exploded.
“No pistols. Not at this range,” Padre said putting his hand across Lee’s barrel.
“Outta my way,” Lee said, pivoting away from the priest with a deranged look on his face. He had put three rounds into two skulls at twenty yards before Padre could say another word. Padre just shrugged and unslung his other rifle.
Somehow, miraculously, Chet was able to push off from the shoulders of one of the headless zombies now resting against the gravel slope. He launched himself five or six inches up the slope. It was just enough to take the edge off his panic. All the gunfire, too, was sending the swarm into a frenzy. The back of the horde was pushing forward so violently that the zombies still reaching for Chet were being pushed past him.
The conveyor belt was packed tight with the onrushing zombies. Half a dozen at a time were spilling into the grinder, their eyes never leaving the redhead with brass-plated rifle.
There was a steady fountain of gore spraying up well above the platform. “Stand back,” Hoskins urged them. “Thing’s like the bloody Bellagio.”
The men still keeping watch at the first grinder would later say that even some of their swarm tried clawing through the gravel mountain to get to the second grinder.
Meanwhile, Chet was delicately inching his way back to safety. Another couple feet and he would be able to slide down the gravel slope behind the corrugated steel wall that separated the swarm from the grinder and the rest of the factory.
As he finally slid to safety, he stood back up to see a flaming head of hair and two violently green eyes. His face was suddenly knocked to the side from a hand he never saw coming.
“You’re the stupidest, saddest sack of sh—” Gill was saying before her mouth was slammed with the kiss she never saw coming. Her body tensed up like an iron rail, and then slowly, inexorably melted into the contours of his body. Chet didn’t care at that moment or even notice until much later that the palms of his hands were almost entirely worn off. He was leaving bloody handprints all up and down the back of her t-shirt, completely oblivious to the pain.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Padre said several minutes later back on the platform. His plan was well in hand. Both grinders appeared to be exerting only minimal effort to chew through the three or four thousand zombies that had been lead to the factory. Jarrah had finally succeeded in creating enough of a landslide to cap the end of the first canyon. “Where’d you learn to shoot a pistol like that?”
Lee’s smile seemed, as usual, more like a converted sneer. “State champion pistol shooter, 25 meter rapid fire, two years in a row. Would’ve gone to the Olympics, too, if it weren’t for all the drug-testing.”
“Performance-enhancing?” Padre asked.
“Not really.”
*****
“Are you kidding me?” Isherwood yelled. They had all gathered back in the control tower. It had been an hour or so since the second grinder finished devouring the last zombie trapped in either of the two canyons. Impossibly, the first grinder had actually, finally clogged on the last three or so zombies. Justin and Isherwood has been forced to dispatch these by hand.
It was by now three or four in the afternoon. Isherwood had let the door to the control tower clang shut behind him. He was about to run down the stairs as he had so many times before that day, when he stopped suddenly in his tracks.
There was a burned face staring back at him. It was in tatters. Shreds of skin were dangling from the jaw bone and chin. The zombie had already climbed halfway up the stairwell on its hands and what was left of its knees. There were more, too. Isherwood realized with a flash that they had left the gate open all this time. There had been stragglers from both swarms that had been trickling in all this time, unnoticed. They must have finally coalesced around the control tower with all the celebrating feet banging on the metal floor.
Isherwood nearly tripped as he ran back up the stairway. He thought he could feel hands pulling at the back of his neck and tugging at heels of his boots all the way back up. He reached the little landing at the top of the stairs and tried to soften his steps, albeit too late. He pulled the door closed behind him with a harsh scrape of metal on metal. He winced at the sound as he locked the door. He looked around madly for something to further secure the door with. Finding nothing that could help them with the flimsy knob, he dragged a filing cabinet over to the door and laid it down across the door. He would use it, he thought, as sort of a seed crystal for a mounding up the zombies until they fully blocked the door with their bodies.
“Dude,” a voice said behind him. Isherwood turned around to see everybody quietly staring back at him. “Something wrong?” Justin continued with a note of sarcasm.
“How many?” Padre asked.
“Plenty,” Chet said, leaning over the control panel to get an angle on the ground below.
Lee was actually sneering this time. “How the hell did this happen?”
“Oh, come on, nancy boys,” Gill grunted. The burned zombie slammed its face against the small reinforced glass panel on the door, leaving behind a sheet of its skin. “We just killed thousands of these things and we’re gonna be trapped by the last dozen or so. Don’t think so.” As she said it, she had pulled out her collapsible bo. With an angry twitch of her arm, the staff burst outward.
Jarrah was kneeling where the filing cabinet had been a minute ago. “He about to start praying or something,” Hoskins asked Padre. The priest just shrugged. There were now several zombies banging against the cheap metal door.
“Ah, no, no, no,” Jarrah said. As some of the others grouped around the man, who still kneeling on the floor, they saw that the filing cabinet had been standing on a trap door in the gray, linoleum floor. Jarrah was holding the square door ajar by a metal loop handle. Hoskins whistled softly as he leaned over behind Jarrah.
“Just how bad is it?” Holly asked.
“Hundreds,” Hoskins answered. “Should’ve never let ourselves all in one place like this.”
“At least,” Jarrah added.
“The hell?” Lee said, knocking the office chair on its side.
“Shhh!” Gill rounded on the man, furiously.
“Like it matters,” Lee grumbled, crossing his arms in front of him.
“Come on, guys,” Isherwood said. “Let’s get after this before it gets dark.”
“No,” Chet said. He was still leaning over the control panel to look out the window. “Wait. Look.”
Holly moved to Chet’s side. “What is it? A little boy?”
“It’s not an ‘it’ – he’s still alive, I think,” Chet said. “Just look at him.”
“What’s he doing?” Hoskins asked. “Hey
, quiet, you idiots. I think this guy’s trying to help us outta this mess.”
Soon, they were all crowded into the window, like some kind of grim family portrait. Over a hundred yards in front of the tower, there was a man standing at the factory gate. They saw that the man, whoever he was, had closed the factory gate and was now making all the racket he could manage. Already, there was a trail of zombies, like picnic ants, leading away from the control tower to the gate.
“He’s not gonna get all of ‘em over there.” Lee said.
“Yeah, but he’ll probably get enough.” Isherwood said. “Get ready. Once we get off the stairs, run for the vehicles. There’s a road going around the perimeter of the factory. We’ll get their attention and then leave them at the back of the factory.”
“What about the little dude?” Justin asked. “We’ll pick him up on the way out, right?”
Isherwood was nodding, but before he could say anything, Jarrah interrupted. “Wait, let’s not leave all those critters inside the factory. We may need to do this little maneuver again.”
“We’ll just mow ‘em down. No problem once we’re in the open,” Gill said shrugging.
“Little dude might not leave us much to do,” Chet said. “Look at him go.” As they watched, they noticed that there was already a dotted line of dispatched zombies leading away from where the man at the fence was standing.
“He’s pretty good with that thing, whatever it is.” Lee said. In ones and twos, the zombies were staggering into the fence and then collapsing against it.
“I don’t get it,” Holly said. “What’s happening – what’s he doing?”
Justin looked at the younger girl in confusion. “He’s braining them with that golden stick-thing. You know, through the fence.”