Cajun Zombie Chronicles: (Book 3): The Kingdom Dead

by Smith, S. L.

  Fortunately, the house’s backyard wasn’t clear-cut all the way back to the levee road. There was a stand of timber that would provide the girls some cover as they ran. Gill and Holly were able to disappear into the woods by the time the two men rounded the side of the brick house. The girls listened and watched the men as they stood scanning the backyard and trying to decide which way they had gone. Holly understood now what Gill had only felt before. These men were not here to help them. On top of that, they were really well armed. The girls watched the horde, too, as it swelled in size behind their pursuers. The horde began forking around the small house like a slow-moving wall of water. The men seemed oblivious to the danger and the moans now being directed at them.

  The sound of the horde was deafening as hundreds and hundreds of voices moaned together in anticipation. Gill and Holly dashed through the small copse of woods without caring about the racket they were making. Holly’s glasses nearly fell off a half dozen times as the branches whipped against her face.

  “Hey, yo, Padre,” Gill whispered into the radio before slipping over the crest of the levee. She was gulping down air after charging up the gentle sloping hill. It was the adrenaline. “That creep car. Bad hombres chasing us. Trying to get back your way. Going stealth. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Over and out.”

  Holly wasn’t far behind Gill, though she was breathing much heavier. When she saw that Gill had paused on the far side of the levee, she let herself collapse into the grass. She lay there panting.

  “Come on,” Gill began kicking Holly into motion. “Just cleared the woods. Headed this way.” She took one last peak over the crest of the levee at their pursuers. They were looking up and down the wide open stretch of the levee road, deciding which way to go. She knew they were about to see their fresh, muddy footprints leading across the roadway. She cursed, scolding herself for not being better at this. She was used to the dead chasing her, not the living. But she was going to learn from this lesson, she told herself.

  As she had expected, one of the men was pointing out their tracks to the other man. Both of them had dark hair and pale skin. As the men’s gaze crept up the levee, the horde of dead began breaking through the trees behind them. At first, there were no zombies. Then, there were a few, then hundreds. There were now lines of them issuing from between the trees and thickets, like strings of cheese through a grater.

  “Come on,” Gill said tugging at Holly’s foot. “We’ll lose ‘em in the water.”

  “In the water?” Holly nearly screamed, but it didn’t matter. The sounds of the oncoming horde were echoing between the trees and the levee. “The current will suck us in … and there’re sharks in there.”

  “Sharks back that way, too,” Gill answered. “We’ll stick to the shallows. Hopefully, they’ll divide up, maybe even ruin their guns in the mud.” They trudged down the back side of the levee into a heavily wooded area. It was dark beneath the canopy of the trees. There was standing water at the foot of the trees. Dark islands of land rose here and there, they could see, deeper into the swamp.

  “Gators, too,” Holly continued her rant after they had dropped back into the shadows. “They find cows by the shallows, you know …”

  “Go that way,” Gill said, pushing the other girl into the water in the downstream direction, back towards the school. “I’ll join back up with you in a sec.”

  “… they find the cows …” Holly was saying, as Gill disappeared into the shadows in the opposite direction. She started hustling deeper into the woods, as she saw the two men silhouetted against the top of the levee. There would soon be many more silhouettes standing against the gray overcast sky as the horde began cresting the levee.

  “ … they find the cows, Gill, with their legs torn clean off,” Holly continued ranting as Gill returned to her side a few minutes later. “What was that all about?” Holly asked. They were maybe forty or fifty yards deep into shadows of the swamp.

  “I wanted them to see my footprints going upstream and yours going downstream,” Gill whispered. “Maybe they’ll divide up, thinking we divided up, and then it’ll be two on one. Come on,” Gill said, leading the girl on deeper into the forest.

  Gill was making sure she kept the line of light that marked the forest’s edge at her right. She didn’t want to lose track of it as they pushed deeper into the forest. The held each other’s hands as they trudged through the slippery mud. Luckily, only one seemed to lose her balance at a time. Holly’s Converse All-Stars clung to her feet, while Gill’s slip-on boots soon filled with the dark water. After another twenty yards, she lost the boots entirely to the mud’s suction.

  Suddenly, Gill disappeared. She had put her foot down at the edge of a hole and slipped the rest of the way. She flailed her arms and legs around until she found purchase. She crawled back over the edge of the hole and pushed her head up through the remaining foot or so of water. She scrambled away from the hole, like it had been the mouth of some giant fish. She spat out the dark water and wiped the hair from her face.

  “The hell?” Gill finally said, still looking wild-eyed at Holly, who was trying to walk around the place where Gill had suddenly disappeared.

  “Let’s start walking single-file, kay?” Holly said. “Could’ve been a gator in that hole. Could’ve been a wide-open mouth waiting to snap,” she said clapping her hands together like a mouth.

  They trudged through the mud in single-file for another thirty minutes or so before stopping to rest on one of the patches of land that rose above the water level. “Think we’ve gone far enough?” Holly asked. “We’ve had to be going now as far as we walked, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Gill answered.

  “Let’s at least peak over the levee. I mean, listen. Do you hear anything following us? Even the sounds of the zees splashing around are dying off.”

  “’Dying off,’ huh?” Gill said with a smirk. “Little late for that.”

  “Come on,” Holly said now beginning to pull on Gill. “Time we got out of these stupid, dark, monster-infested waters.”

  Gill allowed the younger girl to pull her to the verge of the forest, where they could observe their side of the levee from the shadows. They stood quietly together on the far side of a thick cypress tree.

  “See?” Holly said. “Nada, nothing, not even those zeeks.”

  “Okay,” Gill said. “See that bit of scrub up there? Get to the far side of it. We’ll take cover before rolling down the other side like those two idiots from the Princess Bride.”

  It should have been an easy slope. Between Holly’s mounting exhaustion and Gill’s loss of shoes, they each slipped once or twice. Gill normally looked so graceful, but just now they looked pathetic.

  “Let’s just not talk about that last bit when we get back home, okay?” Gill whispered, as she looked back the way they came. She didn’t see any sign of their pursuers either in the forest or along the hill before it. She crept around to the far side of the small stand of trees. She saw now that it was what remained of a wide tree stump. Grass and weeds had grown up around it. The tree itself had sent up shoots which were growing into trees in their own right.

  She cursed. “Where the’ell those frickers go?”

  “Look,” Holly said. She was looking in the opposite direction as Gill, further downstream along the levee. “The school. You can just see it around the bend.”

  Gill paused, finally listening to what the other girl was saying. She forcibly raised her gaze from the road and the soft grass and earth that ran along either side of it. She saw that Holly was right. The school was within sight. They top of the levee afforded a great view of the countryside downstream from them. There was a wall of trees along the far side of the roadway, but this abruptly ended in an open field. It was the same field that they had first run across trying to lead the horde away.

  “It looks empty,” Holly said. “No zeeks.”

  “Yeah,” Gill said. “But no Hummer, no Padre, either.”

  CHAPTE
R NINE: THE BOBCAT

  Lee was nervously checking the fuel gauge of the Bobcat. His hands were sweating as he gripped the two joystick-like hand controls at his left and right knees. The grey vinyl controls were growing sticky. Most of the interior of the forklift was well-worn and coated in residue of chewing tobacco and energy drinks. He had wiped a fair bit of the plastic surfaces clean as he waited for the oncoming horde. He had over a half tank of fuel, but not much more.

  When he first heard the horn of the Humvee in the distance, the forklift’s cockpit suddenly felt very small. Within a foot or two of either side of his head was plexiglass and a metal cage. The walls would hold back the zombies, but they’d still be face to face, as their rotting flesh pressed and smeared across the plexiglass.

  It was the front of the bobcat that sent chills back and forth across his shoulders. The front of the cockpit was a just a plexiglass door. There were no metal bars reinforcing the plastic. The door wasn’t to the side of the driver’s seat like a car. The door was directly in front of the driver’s seat, as were the twin forks of the machine. The door would be a tough entry point for the zombies, as it was directly behind the tines of the forklift. It’s just a flimsy sheet of plastic, Lee thought, trying to repress the thought. There’ll be nowhere to hide inside this thing if I stop moving.

  Padre nodded at him as he drove slowly past and took up a position behind the much smaller vehicle, as they had planned. Lee wondered at Padre’s hand sign. He wasn’t waving at him. Did that priest just flip me off? He would later learn that Padre had flashed him a chi-rho, by folding his thumb across his last two fingers.

  He wasn’t thinking about Padre’s hands for long. The leading front of the horde was close at the Humvee’s heels, due the priest’s uncommon level of patience. Lee wanted to keep the crowd around him thin. “Charge,” Lee said to himself, as he pushed the hand controls forward dramatically. There was no lurch of speed, however, to match the man’s dramatic flourish. The machine plodded slowly forward at a maximum speed of less than ten miles per hour. It would be enough to outdistance himself from zombies, if necessary. He hoped.

  He aimed the forklift at a quartet of angry zombies. He stopped before them as another ten or more approached from the sides. As they staggered towards the tines of the upraised fork, Lee pushed jerked the joystick to left. The bobcat started turning. By the time it had rotated ninety degrees, it was moving. By the time it had completed a full three hundred sixty degree turn, the first quartet of zombies had dragged themselves to the place where the tines of the fork had been a moment ago. The kill zone.

  Lee had just guesstimated what height to set the fork at. He had been spot on, though. The tines of the forklift swung back around with terrific speed and violence. Three heads rocketed towards left field. “A triple,” Lee roared in bloodlust. The third zombie of the quartet had been shorter than the others, but he, too, had been eliminated. Lee didn’t see exactly what happened, but its skull had caved in on impact.

  The second time around, there were two packs of zombies approaching from either side. Lee had been worrying all along that more zombies would slow down the Bobcat’s rotational speed. It didn’t. Not yet, anyway. The tines of the fork, though they seemed blunt, cut like the Grim Reaper’s sickle. It didn’t always give a clean slice, like Isherwood’s katanas. The machine was ruthlessly efficient, though, like the grinders had been at the gravel yard. They treated the rotted human forms like so much scrap metal, mechanically separating the brain stems from the rest of spine.

  Lee stopped the Bobcat’s spin on a dime. He stopped just past the zero-degree mark, twelve o’clock. He scooted the machine forward fifteen feet into the thick of the approaching crowd. The first quartet of beheaded zombies were flattened beneath the machine and gave hardly a bump in protest.

  Padre had parked the Humvee and was watching the Bobcat’s heavy-footed dance with concern. He had risen from the vehicle’s turret and had picked off one or two strays. Only a couple had reached his vehicle, but it seemed Lee and his machine had stolen the show. The Bobcat had the full attention of the entire horde.

  “Let’s give the old girl a real test,” Lee whistled from inside the forklift’s cab. There were now over twenty zombies nearly within reach of the forklift when Lee started spinning. On top of that, another dozen or so would rush in before the Bobcat completed its first turn.

  The Bobcat soon proved itself a cold-blooded killing machine. After its first sweep in the new position, it had been nearly perfect, but it hadn’t batted a thousand. Not quite. Every zombie had been knocked off its feet, but not every one had been put down. Lee thought he saw, though he couldn’t be sure because of all the spinning, a headless woman stagger back to her feet. At the sight of her, he had felt fear as he had not felt fear since the beginning of it all.

  She had been some sort of office woman, Lee thought. Her skirt had fallen off a long time ago as her waistline slowly wasted away. Maybe just enough of the brain stem was left intact, he wondered, to allow her to stagger back to her feet. He didn’t see her again after the third turn. Maybe she just collapsed.

  Padre watched from the Humvee as heads were being launched off the roadway in every direction. It was like watching a sprinkler, he thought. Padre got distracted watching as one head tumbled and bounced a good fifty feet into the field beside the school. A grounder to right field, he mused.

  Lee rolled the Bobcat back seven feet or so. He had quickly realized that he needed to keep moving. If he didn’t, he wasn’t sure how the forklift would manage up a hill of body parts. He knew this kind of forklift could handle more than just the floor of a warehouse, but he didn’t want to push it. He might be able to push his way through, but he might, just as likely, become immobilized.

  Padre quickly realized this wrinkle in the plan, as well. He wasn’t going to be able to keep moving back and forth between the turret and the driver’s seat. He wasn’t doing much at the moment, anyway, and took the opportunity to reposition his vehicle out of Lee’s way. He turned the Humvee broadside, so he could stay in the driver’s seat and still shoot from the driver’s side window. He could use the window sill as a rest for his rifle. Not that it really matters, he thought. Not much company coming my way. The only clean-up duty he would be needed for, he mused, were all the zombie parts left in the roadway.

  A sharp report from a rifle momentarily overcame the steady thumping and clacking of the forklift against skulls and spines. There was a soft, unheard thwack of impact, and a gray-haired skull suddenly deformed. The skull had belonged to a maimed zombie that was dragging itself slowly towards the Humvee. It had been Padre’s .44 magnum Henry rifle. Padre quickly ratcheted the lever-arm and ejected the spent cartridge. The priest hated the “draggers,” as they had taken to calling them. They could be the most dangerous now that it seemed like stands of tall grass and weeds were growing everywhere. Adults could wear tall boots to protect themselves, but the draggers were lethal to the children. The St. Mary’s group hadn’t lost any children like this, but they had just taken on a small band of survivors who had.

  Lee, meanwhile, was growing more and more confident in his machine. If nothing else, the swinging fork was doing a fine job knocking the zombies away from him. But the forklift was doing something else, it was tearing the zombies apart. More than that, it wasn’t just a bunch of animated torsos crawling about. The fork was the equivalent of a lawnmower blade, mowing down the zombies like individual blades of grass and leaving behind a perfectly clipped lawn of headless, or headless enough, zombies.

  Lee again checked the fuel gauge. The needle had barely moved, but it had still moved. Maybe just a sixteenth of a tank, he thought. At this rate, he could go for another forty-five minutes. Lee cussed. Looking into the distance at the road ahead, he would need another hour, at least.

  After trying to focus on the fuel gauge for a moment, Lee gulped. It wasn’t out of fear for the massive amount of zombies that lay ahead of him. It was the spinning. He was extrem
ely grateful for the slow retreat he had started after every five or six turns. Not because he wasn’t stuck, but because it gave him a short respite from all the spinning. The constant spinning was making him nauseous. He hadn’t thought about this part. He had never spent much time on boats, much less the open sea. Had he, he would have learned about his susceptibility for seasickness. An hour of nearly endless spinning now stretched out like a nightmare before him.

  Something suddenly rumbled inside Lee’s belly. He shivered. A moment later, the contents of his stomach were swirling around the inside of the Bobcat and splattering the inside of the plexi-glass. The caustic juices burned the inside of his mouth and throat. He winced as he felt a sudden drop in his blood pressure. He wavered near the edge of fainting. He closed his eyes and willed himself back to livid consciousness.

  After the rush of vomiting, he relaxed visibly. Lee realized it had given him relief for the job ahead. He actually felt much better. The nausea from the near constant spinning had receded to manageable levels. There was, however, a new wave of nausea as he noticed the smell. It wasn’t just the vomit. It was the blend of smells: the sweet smells of rotting flesh and vomit. “God help me,” Lee said aloud as his eyes rolled back in his head.

  Lee’s head lurched back forward suddenly as he dry-heaved between his legs. He had mercifully stopped spinning for the moment and was edging several feet backwards. He reached down deep within himself to start spinning again, deeper than he had ever attempted. When he started spinning again, there was something strange in the air. There was still the sweetness, but it was a living sweetness.

  “Roses,” he said, shivering for a third time. The smell didn’t last long, but it was long enough. The other smells and spinning had grown suddenly much more manageable. There was a glint of light. His eyes slowly focused on the right tine of the forklift, which lay ahead of him. He had, without making a conscious decision to do it, started spinning the Bobcat to his right. There was something hanging from the flat metal bar of the right tine. It was a silver chain. It was glinting and fluttering upward as it clung to the spinning forklift.