by Nick Cole
We lumbered awkwardly up the dirt berm and onto the old road that straddled the highway.
“Hurry! Hurry!” yelled the Waving Man.
All along the line, men and women swore amidst blue smoke and flying brass. The ground was littered with spent shells.
The tank roared again and the overpass shook.
I turned to see what the tank was firing at and saw a plume of dirt and smoke in the highway median far down the road. A sea of dead people surged forward, moved around the explosion, flew into the air above it and kept crawling forward through it. They covered every inch of the ground all the way to the far hills. They were fording a small river, crashing into the muddy brown water, crawling through the muck, heaving themselves up onto the banks. They lay in piles near the wall beneath the overpass, but still they came forward in long trains climbing atop the piles, gnashing their teeth, clawing their way toward the top of the overpass.
A kid with a shotgun ran down the line, stopping only to pump rounds and curse into the mindless faces below.
“Hurry!” I heard Karen say.
It wasn’t just a nameless mass. It was a sea of dead people. Infected. Zombies.
I saw a man down there amongst them. He reminded me of one of my father’s wealthy friends. He had the same chin. His eyes were wild, his skin gray, his gnashing teeth broken.
I saw children. Or once they had been children.
I saw a woman, beautiful before. She was running across the field below us. Even as an infected she still had grace. She must have been a runner once. The muscle memory still working after... A bullet caught her in the head and sent her tumbling.
Heavy machineguns ripped through clusters of people where, for a fleeting moment, I thought I had seen some familiar face, as if there were only so many facial types in the world, and in every face was someone you had once known.
Sherry Taylor, my first kiss.
Watson Hughes, a kid who broke his arm one summer. We’d been best friends before the broken arm. But that summer separated us. I spent the summer at camp, fishing and hiking. When I returned, tanned and alive, we weren’t the same anymore. We’d each found new friends.
Our path in the woods had diverged.
And...
It had made all the difference.
My brother Carter. That same shock of curly hair.
Others. So many others. Seeing all of them in the faces that came streaming across the dry brown fields of stubble and the muddy river, roaring for our blood and flesh, only to be blown to bits, cut in half, or horribly maimed right in front of our eyes.
They came on and on, and behind them seemed to be all the people that the world could hold. Except that they were no longer people.
“RPGs,” yelled the Waving Man. “Get back down there and get us some more RPGs!”
I ran. I didn’t know where Karen was. I passed Ramos sweating and smiling at me as he struggled under the weight of machine gun belts.
He said something.
The roar of gunfire was too loud. I leaned forward.
“I said,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to be the guy who fills out the forms for Reconstruction after this fight, Homes!” He laughed sharply in my ear.
“That guy up there wants RPGs,” I told Petersen.
“People in hell want ice water!” Then, “Here, ya get two. That’s all for now.”
With one in each hand, I raced back up onto the overpass. My legs felt weak and tired. There was so much acrid blue gun smoke, I could hardly breathe.
“Hurry!” yelled the Waving Man.
I struggled along the firing line as hot brass shells landed on my arms, stinging and burning all at once. I couldn’t protect myself from their hot touch because of the RPG in each hand.
Below and out there in the Sea of the Dead, Jordan Hastings, Natalie Wuhl, Farnsworth Bascomb, Sharon Chen, Uncle Bob, Ted Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Mick Jagger. I felt I could see all of them in the masses that rolled forward, crushing and crashing into and through anything that stood between them and us.
Trees were falling.
Buildings were falling.
“Use those on that bridge!” the Waving Man shouted at me. “We need to slow ‘em down. They’re coming across the bridge too fast.”
The kid with the shotgun inserted himself between us, pumped a round into the chamber, leaned over the side, and fired down into the crawling mass below.
“Take that ya bunch of freaks!”
Then he was down the line, cursing above the blare of gunfire.
“I don’t know how to fire these things,” I told the Waving Man.
He turned away from me, yelling toward someone down the line.
“I don’t have time for this, son! We’ve got to take out that bridge ASAP.”
“THEY’RE TUNNELING THROUGH THE GAP!” someone screamed below us.
“Aw hell!” said the Waving Man as he pointed at one of my RPGs. “Deploy this, snap that back, and fire. Simple. Now aim it and blow that bridge to hell.”
The Waving Man ran off down the line.
I pointed the RPG at the bridge beyond the walls, farther down the highway. They were coming across it. Falling, shambling, racing. All of them.
I pressed the trigger, not expecting the thing to actually fire. The rocket raced away, twirling smoke, and impaled itself into the center of the bridge. Steel and metal and once-people arched away in a bright plume of flame.
I grabbed the other RPG.
I deployed. I snapped. I fired.
I aimed for the supports on the far side of the bridge.
The round would probably drop. I aimed higher.
I fired.
The rocket snaked away.
The bridge collapsed on one side, spilling the already horrified dead into the water.
I expected their faces to be indignant. As though it were a home video of a wedding on a pontoon boat suddenly giving way, spilling people into the water, ruining this grand event. But they surged mindlessly forward into the muddy current. The ones at the bank fell forward as those behind them trampled onward, piling up, piling upon a pile of... people.
Behind us, on the floor of the castle, flamethrowers were being used on the dirt berm that filled in the overpass. Holes were appearing as the living dead crawled out, covered in dirt. Soldiers raced back and forth spreading hot jets of flame as gray heads and scabby fingers pushed through the earth.
I ran back to Petersen.
“We ain’t got much left and everybody wants something. Start grabbing everything and hauling it up there,” he yelled in my ear above the mix of gunfire and the stadium roar of torment and hate that the dead made all around us beyond the earthen walls.
I grabbed an RPG and a crate of ammo and dragged them once more onto the overpass.
I could smell the gasoline from the flamethrowers above the blue smoke.
I heard the thick WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP of helicopter blades. Gunships came in low over the top of the overpass, guns burping out shadowy sprays of black lead into the crowd below.
The soldiers cheered, and still the Dead came on, gaping holes in their chests, missing arms, torn in half.
“What do I fire this at?” I said, holding up the RPG.
The Shotgun Kid looked at me as though I were stupid.
“Into them, ya moron!”
The dead were crawling upward, almost reaching the top of the berm.
“Anyone got shotgun rounds?” I heard the Kid ask.
I fired the RPG.
I didn’t even aim. I just shot it into a moaning crowd approaching the base of the dirt wall below. A moment later, all the damage I’d done was washed away by another wave of scrambling corpses.
“Get back, you...” The Kid was swinging the shotgun down onto the head of one of the dead who’d crawled up onto the overpass.
“Man down!”
To my right, a female soldier was being pulled over the heavy machinegun she was firing by a raving gray-fleshed man who had pr
obably once been a construction worker before becoming a corpse. Another soldier that’d been feeding ammo into the gun backed away in horror as the dead suddenly surged forward around the woman machine-gunner.
I didn’t think.
I know why now.
I had been here before.
Kathy Henderson-Kiel.
I launched myself forward. I grabbed the woman machine-gunner as I should have grabbed Kathy Henderson-Kiel as she was being pulled through the copy room wall.
As we tried to get up to the floor above.
As the dead beat on the flimsy door and came through the thin copy room walls.
Just after my fourth shame.
Everybody was dead. Derek. Carmichael. The people in the other buildings. Everyone. It was just the two of us now. On that floor alone.
Me and Kathy Henderson-Kiel.
The last woman I’d held as a woman... and made love to... and didn’t love.
Could anything else but that have happened?
It happened.
I’m sorry Alex.
I needed you to be dead, because in my heart, you already were.
How could anyone survive what I’d seen on the streets below the Tower and in the shadowy stairwells all around me?
How could you still be alive, Alex?
My fourth shame is not that I made love to Kathy Henderson-Kiel in the copy room, but that I believed you were dead, Alex.
I gave up on you when I shouldn’t have.
The woman gunner was going. Hauled over the top of the hot gun barrel. Disappearing into a gray forest tangle of scabby arms and teeth and dead-eyed lunatic faces.
I reached down into the dogpile of arms and leering grins and broken teeth, ignoring their raving groans and papery growls.
I found her legs and hauled her backward, both of us falling back onto the overpass.
The Shotgun Kid came in, pumping rounds and firing point-blank into the cluster that had tried to take her. They disintegrated in fleshy gray sprays under the withering blast of the shotgun.
“Get back on that gun!” yelled the Shotgun Kid.
The woman looked at her arms in horror.
“Am I bleeding?” she shrieked.
The other soldier, her assistant who had backed away, bent down. He was frantically looking for bite marks.
“Get back on that gun, mister!” whined the Shotgun Kid as he swung his weapon at a one-armed zombie crawling its way back up and over the guard rail.
The line. The thin line that had to be held.
I stumbled forward to the gun.
I rotated the barrel onto the crowd piling up just feet below, climbing up onto the bodies of the fallen, their fangs and eyes filled with all the malice the world had to offer.
“Pull the handle back on the side!” screamed the woman on the ground as she looked up at me with horror.
I pulled.
My hand was squeezing the trigger.
The gun roared to life and before I knew it, a belt of ammo was gone.
I felt electric.
I felt alive.
The woman crawled forward. She linked another belt and fed it into the gun.
“Keep going,” she said, her voice trembling uncontrollably.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fire!” she screamed through her tears.
I fired again, feeling the machinegun spit back its cold hatred into the faces of the clustering dead. I heard the woman sobbing as she linked another belt to the one that was threading its way into the machinegun.
Out on the horizon above the dead, a large plane with long swept-back wings and a thin body, its engines trailing black contrails, turned slowly off toward our left flank.
“What’s that?” I asked over the roar of the powerful machinegun.
The woman kept sobbing. “Oh no,” she mumbled as she looked up through tear-soaked eyes and saw the plane.
Below us, the finally dead were indistinguishable from the undead. Everything was a body. And through every body crawled eyes and teeth and claws. There were too many of them. Far too many of them.
“Airstrike inbound!” yelled the Waving Man as he ran down the line atop the overpass. “Get off the wall now! We’re calling it in, Danger Close.”
The Waving Man pulled people backwards, flinging them down onto the dirt berm inside the Castle. Other soldiers were leaping down themselves into the still-burning flames from the bodies of the zombies that had crawled through the dirt beneath the overpass.
“Get off the wall!” screamed the Waving Man.
“Get out of here!” I said to the sobbing woman as a wave of undead rose up in front of the barrel of the gun.
She wouldn’t move.
I couldn’t stop firing. The zombies were surging forward too quickly. I was sending short bursts at them whenever and wherever I saw movement.
We were the only ones left on the wall.
“Get off the wall now!” screamed the Waving Man, dragging the sobbing woman backward.
Off to our left, the bomber, a B-52 I think, leveled out. It would cross in front of the overpass in just seconds. I could see the pilots craning forward in their seats to see the ground below.
“Move!” yelled the Waving Man.
I kept firing. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the bomb bay doors open on the plane.
Everything was so clear. And so real.
I left the gun and grabbed the other arm of the woman as the Waving Man dragged her toward the other side of the thin road atop the overpass.
The engines of the bomber quickly rose to a high-pitched whine that seemed to fill the entire world. All at once, they screamed as if the pilot were adding sudden and terrible power.
Zombies surged onto the roadway of the overpass directly behind us as we stumbled down the other side of the dirt wall and into the castle. Soldiers were firing at us. Firing at the zombies right behind us.
The jet streaked by as if going from slow motion to fast forward all at once.
I felt a hot wave of fire push us down off the hill, flinging us onto our faces into the burning, soft dirt.
It was over.
There weren’t any more coming over the top of the hill. A few, on fire, crawled across the road and started down the other side as snipers finished them off.
Plumes of black smoke rose from beyond the overpass castle in the killing fields of the dead.
We crawled back to the top of the overpass.
On the other side, we saw the end of the world again.
Everything was on fire.
And still they flung themselves through it, only to burn and fall, and finally collapse, until there weren’t any more of them left.
Everything smelled of gasoline.
The bomber was high in the sky, turning out toward the west, climbing away from our hell. Pillars of black smoke rose in anger as soldiers, all of us now, gathered ourselves from the ground.
The deafening roar of the engines and the blast of the bombs still rang in our ears, creating a soft silence that seemed to make the day unreal.
The Waving Man was back atop the overpass, binoculars held up, scanning the horizon.
“We beat ‘em!”
Everyone cheered. They were glad to be alive. At least for one more day.
The gunner was peeling of her fatigues, looking for bite marks, her hands trembling. Her partner helped her.
“I’m good,” she said, looking up, tears in her eyes. “I’m good.” The man hugged her and then I could not tell if they were weeping or laughing.
I heard him sob, repeating, “I thought I’d lost you” over and over.
I found Karen holding a cigarette, her face blackened from the smoke of the fires, her tiny frame fading, as if barely holding on to existence.
I wondered how much further she would go.
How much further would we all go?
And then I looked in her eyes.
I heard my dad. Something he used to say. A line
from an old movie.
From Here to Eternity.
“And we will all go from here to eternity.”
Amongst the burning and the dying and the dead, one tiny woman, refusing to fade.
“Karen, I want to find this woman everyone calls the Lady. How would I do that?”
She stretched and looked around.
Somewhere we both heard a gunshot and neither of us jumped.
“The Army seems centered around that tank of theirs. We might want to check with them.”
We found an officer, map in hand, clearing a space on the hood of a sedan.
“Excuse me.”
He looked at me, the sudden hatred of the overworked flashing.
“I’m looking for someone they call the Lady. I think I might know her from... before everything.”
“That so,” he flattened his map and studied it for a moment.
“Excuse me!” I’d had enough.
He held up a hand.
“I heard you. That’s what I’m all about here, right now. Her group drew off some runners who were all over us when we came down out of the pass. They haven’t made it back. They’re still out there. Who the hell are you with?”
“Reconstruction.”
“Well, get yer team and saddle up. We’re gonna ride out to their last known position and try to find ‘em. Reconstruction might be some help.”
An hour later, Karen was at the wheel of our Humvee. Ramos and I rode in back. Guy rode up front with Karen. We followed three sport utility vehicles that had seen better days. They were filled with soldiers.
We drove to the other side of the berm and out onto the highway heading west.
Corpses were everywhere. Unmoving. Silent. Finally dead.
We forded the shallow river, corpses floating along its banks, caught amongst the deadfall and clumps of other corpses. On the far side of the river, the highway ran straight west and we followed it.
Corpses that hadn’t been people for a long time were flung in every direction.
Arms akimbo.
Arms thrown over rotting faces.
Legs splayed.
Legs missing.
Mostly whole.
Some parts missing.
In half.
Dirty.
Wild-eyed.
Gray.
Green.
Clean.
Horrified.