“Monssers, Mole. Monssers!”
His screams might as well have painted a target on their backs. The bloodied contractors and their savaged comrade rose from the ground, heads jerking back and forth as they scanned the parking lot. Molly bit back a curse. Abandoning all pretense of stealth, she stumbled into a run toward the Humvee. Her footing was loose and uncertain, and the terrified voice in the back of her head started screaming that she wasn’t going to make it, that she was just spinning her legs like some absurd cartoon character.
She dared not look back, and the screaming child she carried told her everything that she needed to know. It didn’t matter if they were coming closer or if she was getting away. In either case, they would never stop, unless she was able to get out of their immediate sight line. She’d learned that much on her own, out beyond the exclusion zone. The ability to run and hide had saved her skin more than once, though she’d never pushed the issue. The weight of her responsibility to Dave and the others had always kept her from taking too many risks—but the entire concept of safety was relative to the overall shape of civilization.
She got to the driver’s door of the Humvee and yanked it open with her free arm. Molly shoved Hatch inside and followed immediately after. One of the faster zombies came within a hair’s breadth of stopping her from slamming the door shut, but the latch clicked shut before it could do little more than hook a single fingertip on the frame. Frantic, she checked the other doors, but she didn’t see anything that looked like a door lock. Sitting still and letting them figure out all they had to do to get to the tasty treats inside was pull on a latch seemed to be a bad idea, so she sat up in the driver’s seat as the quartet began pounding on the doors and windows. Hatch took one look at the situation and crawled into the floorboards in front of the passenger seat, curling up into a ball.
“It’s going to be okay, buddy,” Molly said. The dashboard of the Humvee was better labeled than the patrol car. She flipped a switch on the left side of the steering wheel from the position marked ‘Eng Stop’ to the one labeled ‘Start Up.’ A red light emblazoned ‘Wait’ lit above the toggle, and she found herself laughing hysterically. “Easy for you to say!”
The light went out, and she repeated the motion she’d seen Connelly perform, flipping the toggle over again. This time, the engine came to life with a roar, and she pumped a fist in exultation. “Here we go!”
Once she got the big truck in gear, Molly started out slowly. If she wrecked the truck or got hung up on one of the others, they were screwed. The zombies pounding on the sides fell away, but others popped up as she cranked the steering wheel over, pulling out of the parking area. She missed one, but another ended up right in the middle of the hood, and as she straightened out, she ran it over with bone-breaking force. In a strange way, that was almost cathartic, but she forced herself to keep driving away. They wanted to leave, not stick around.
The ease of simply running them over made her consider making a circuit of the camp and doing just that, but the chance of breaking down made her push the thought away. What if she blew a tire as she had on the patrol car? They’d be worse off than Hatch had been when she found him—surrounded without the benefit of a safe zone to retreat to.
We run, she told herself. We run until we find a safe place, and then we hole up.
The lab appeared out of the smoke, giving her a navigational reference. Just as soon as she thought she’d gotten her bearings, she nosed the Humvee forward into a thick clot of the smoke and emerged before an inferno. The crumpled metal frames of generators and fuel tanks were all that remained of the impromptu power plant, and she was more than a little impressed at the destruction she’d wrought. The only problem, of course, was that she couldn’t go this way.
More comfortable with the safety of the big truck’s bulk, she took her time in backing up, executing a three-point turn and pulling around the opposite side of the building. Most of their pursuit had fallen off in the smoke, but other figures staggered toward her as she turned around the front of the lab building.
And nearly ran over Henry Schantz.
His eyes were wild, and he stared at her through the windshield for a moment before shaking his head and turning back to his task. He was bent over a metal box secured to the wall, further down from the door she’d been using to come and go from the lab. Metal conduits snaked down into it from the roof. As she stared, she realized what he was doing—he was trying to get some portion of the power grid back up. Sure, the generators were down, but could the solar panels provide enough electricity to power the exclusion zone? She very much doubted they could after a glance toward the smoke-filled sky, but from his labors, the doctor seemed to think otherwise.
Molly could have honked the horn to draw attention, and she very nearly did. In the end, it didn’t matter—stumbling figures caught sight of the doctor without any assistance from her. Henry must have heard them approaching over the sound of the Humvee’s engine because he looked wildly from side to side. The movements of his hands inside of the electrical box grew frantic.
“If you have to fight, never leave an enemy behind you—zombie or not. Oversights like that have a way of biting you in the ass,” Dave had told her once. She’d demurred even while internally debating the sentiment. Short of running him over, there was little she could do—she had no weapons, and there were none in the truck that she could see. No matter her own preferences, the worst thing she could do to the man who helped kill the world was to leave him to the consequences of his own actions.
Henry didn’t look up as she drove past, heading toward the clear air and uncertain safety of the valley below.
Before the smoke obscured the lab building, she saw him running toward the door with death at his heels.
October 18, 2026
Taum Sauk Mountain, eastern Missouri
Z-Day + 3,287
The kid standing over Miles was wiry, his shoulder-length hair bleached by the sun. Despite the depth of his tan, the gray lines tracing his exposed skin stood out in stark, shocking relief. Miles might have despaired at the telltale signs of infection if he hadn’t first seen the boy’s narrowed hazel eyes shining bright white in contrast to the skin of his face. Someway, somehow, this kid was alive, and he couldn’t help but think of Charlie. Would his friend’s skin have looked like this, after a few years of immunity?
Waiting for a single muscle twitch to send the blade at his throat through his jugular, Miles called out, hoping he could make Byers listen before the Marine fired.
“I’m okay, Sergeant. We can talk this out.” He made eye contact with the boy and gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Right? What’s your name, son? I’m Miles.” It would have shocked him if the kid was in his teen years, which was some pretty depressing math in and of itself. But if someone who’d been a baby on Z-Day had made it this long, it was pretty likely that he hadn’t done so on his own. Which was all the more reason to get Byers to stand down—who knew how many eyes were on them at this very moment?
The boy lifted his gaze and stared at something higher and beyond—Byers, he assumed. “Bad man,” he said. There was no fire in the statement, just calm measurement.
The Marine muttered a reaction, but Miles was too far away to make it out. Shock that what looks like an infected can actually talk, unless I miss my guess. “Nah, he’s okay. He’s a Marine—a soldier. Do you know what that is?”
The kid looked down at him, cocking his head to one side, but said nothing.
“My name is Miles,” he said again, trying a different tack. “Are you from around here?”
“Hatcher!”
He resisted the urge to turn his head to look toward the source of the new voice. The kid leaned away and pulled his spear back. Rather than spook him, Miles waited until the kid turned to face the newcomer before using his elbows to push himself toward the Orca.
The boy with the spear relaxed at the sound of the new voice, and Miles thought the coast was clear to c
limb back on his feet. The adrenaline rush was fading, and he was becoming very aware of all the bumps and bruises. I could really go for a hot tub and a nap right about now. The artifact of the old civilization had puzzled Trina during their abbreviated vacation, but he and Tish had taken gleeful advantage of it.
Smack-dab in the middle of the Wild, a hundred miles from safety and with no easy way home, that crumbling hotel room might well have been something from a dream. “I’m not armed,” the new voice called out. “We don’t want any trouble.”
The young woman who slipped out of the woods and advanced toward the fallen aircraft was older than the kid with the spear, but still young enough that Miles doubted she was his mother. Older sister, maybe. She was tall and slender, and while her faded, patch-covered clothing was clean, it had seen better days. She kept her arms lifted away from her sides, palms toward Miles. “We don’t want any trouble,” she repeated.
“Then why the hell is your kid throwing spears at us?” Byers shouted back. Miles winced. When she glanced at him, he shrugged a little as if to say what can you do?
“Hatch,” the girl said, a rising tone in her voice. “Did you throw a spear at these men?”
The boy looked sheepish, the expression incongruous against the gray lines on his face. “Bad man,” he explained. “He had a gun.”
“We have guns, goofball.”
Hatch seemed to consider this for a moment, and then his head bobbed up and down in an abbreviated nod. He looked back up at Byers, and he called out, “Sorry, Scarface.”
“Excuse me?” The Marine sounded more amused than angry, but the girl went a little pale, nonetheless.
“It’s been the two of us for a long time, sir. We’re probably not the greatest at talking to other people.”
Miles looked up as Byers sighed. “No need to call me sir,” the Marine said finally. “I work for a living, young lady.” He met Miles’ eyes. “We shouldn’t be talking out in the open like this, though. Would you two care to join us?”
Surprised, the girl looked around, as though studying the woods around them, then turned back to Byers while shaking her head. “No, we’re okay. The exclusion zone is still in effect in this part of the valley.”
The boy planted the butt of his spear in the ground, squinted at the tree line, and nodded in agreement. “It’s safe.”
Miles shared a look with Byers. “You, ah, know about that? I’m Miles, by the way.”
“Molly. Molly Einhorn. Nice to meet you. And yeah, but it’s kind of a long story. It used to be bigger until I kind of, well, broke it.”
Oh, shit. “How bad did you break it, exactly?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
October 18, 2026
St. Louis, Missouri
Z-Day + 3,287
By the time the resupply boat pulled up alongside Coop’s barge, they were down to aimed shots from their carbines. They’d burned through the last of their machine gun ammo. The lack of firepower had given the twin hordes free reign to rush off the shattered edges of the bridge. The return of the Orcas and the timely arrival of the next A-10 stymied the flow from the west side of the river, but the horde on the east side kept growing, despite the attack craft spending most of its munitions in an attempt to break up the cluster.
Coop envisioned a literal dam of zulu choking off the river itself. He tried to estimate how many bodies it would take to pull off such a feat. Finally, annoyed at his imagination, he forced himself to shake off the calculation. Feet on the deck, Marine. Worry about what’s in front of you.
The ammo hauler was a converted fishing boat. The heavy boom winch on the aft deck made for a handy way to sling crates of mortar rounds across the gap—the chain link skirts on the perimeter of the barge made tying directly alongside impossible.
“Think we bit off more than we can chew, Sergeant?” Stahlberg called out. The radio operator hit the release on the cargo net as soon as the first crate hit the deck. Other Marines took hold of the rope handles to haul it to the bow mortar tube. He’d ordered the first few crates, filled with linked .50-caliber ammunition, to go that way so they could resume clearing zulu off the bridge. There’d been no visible effect from the parade of divers, but he didn’t trust it. If anything had held true over the years, it was the fact that any change in the behavior of the infected was a bad sign.
“We got this, Lance,” Coop said. The fact that up until a few months ago he’d have been one of the cutups and smart-asses was not lost on him. Sergeant Major McFarlane, it seemed, had finally found the way to make him straighten up.
The realization was more than a little frustrating. He was in the middle of the Mississippi River, shelling a national monument during the damn zombie apocalypse, and he couldn’t so much as crack a joke because he had two dozen other Marines to worry about. You are an evil, evil bastard, McFarlane. Despite his newfound control, the corners of his mouth threatened to break into a smile, but his men were too busy to notice.
The next team hauled the second crate toward the bow, and as the squids on the resupply boat swung the third over, the box dipped dangerously, slamming one corner into the deck of the barge and sliding into Gray. The impact sent the Marine flying, and Coop was about to check on him when motion on the cargo boat’s deck made him realize they had far more urgent things to worry about.
Dripping water and river muck, gray-skinned figures pulled themselves over the fishing boat’s low aft deck rail. Coop had no way of knowing how large a mass had gathered below them, but that or the pull of the weight on the starboard side set the other craft to rocking from side to side. One of the Navy crewmen stumbled, and a rush of sodden figures fell onto him. The opposite deck was suddenly awash with blood, his screams cut off almost as soon as they’d begun.
He opened his mouth to order his Marines to fire but hesitated when he realized that the growing swarm had spread through the stacks of crated mortar rounds on the aft deck. The crewmen charged with transferring them over were suddenly trapped in a deadly maze. He cupped his hands and screamed. “Move your asses, Navy!”
A few of them bolted for the pilothouse, wobbling figures close at their heels. He doubted that the flimsy door would keep them out for long, but if they could get good firing angles, the situation wasn’t unrecoverable. A few of the others, closer to the port side, tried to make the jump onto the mortar barge. Two of them made it, but the third clipped a heel on a rail and belly-flopped into the river. Treading water, he strained to reach the fencing, but something pulled him underwater and choked off his screams.
Coop unslung his rifle. “Light ‘em up!” The mortar ammunition had enough safeguards that he wasn’t concerned about a sympathetic detonation, but they needed to watch their angles of fire. At this range, even with the pronounced rocking of the ammo ship and their own less pronounced motion, they cleared the leading edge away from their pursuit of the first batch of sailors. That was the extent of their headway, however—more and more continued to emerge from the water.
Damn, how many of them are down there? As though in response to his thoughts, the mortar barge rocked suddenly. A call from port, just aft of amidships, prompted him to turn.
“Zulu!”
The closest Marines fired down into the water through the chain link fencing. The skirts were doing their job, but the barge was taking on a decided list. They needed to clear them off before the whole shebang capsized. He turned back to the hauler, hoping that the enemy below had shifted en masse to the larger target of the barge, but no such luck.
“Shit,” he hissed. Coop turned to Stahlberg and barked, “Tell the boys in the ammo hauler to pull up a bit so we can bring the Brownings to bear and sweep their deck clear.”
The lance corporal blinked at him for a moment, then nodded and turned back to the radio set. Coop knew what the other man was thinking, but there was nothing else to do. Small arms fire wouldn’t mess up the crates, much. Resorting to the heavy machine guns was liable to shred the boxes. There were enough safety
measures built into the rounds to keep them from exploding, but a deck full of loose rounds was going to be a hell of a lot harder to transfer over than crated ones. And of course, all the while, more and more infected were joining the horde below them, pouring off the east side of the bridge in dribs and drabs.
The besieged boat took off as soon as Stahlberg got the request across, pitching some of the climbers off of the rails and knocking over a good portion of those on deck. The lance corporal waved for his attention, raising his voice to a shout as the other boat drew up in line to the bow and the Browning gunners shifted fire. “Sergeant Major on the horn for you!”
Coop took the radio and barked, “LoPresto.” He had enough going on without McFarlane jogging his elbow.
“We’re rushing the reload on the Orcas, see if we can’t lay some napalm down on the east side. Things are getting a bit too spread out for my taste, but I’m not ready to pull the pin, just yet.”
“We may not have a choice,” Coop said. He hoped the background noise of the firing was enough to cover for the sharpness of his tone. “They’ve built up enough mass underneath us to be able to stand up and get their hands on the skirts. We’re keeping them off so far, but our resupply boat didn’t fare so well.” At the bow, the machine gunners seemed to have completed their task, as the Navy guys were back out on the deck, trying to rig the crane. The first box of rounds they passed over was in sorry shape, but ammo was ammo.
“Saw that,” McFarlane confirmed. “We’ve also lost contact with the Major and his team. Shit’s gettin’ real.”
Well, hell. Coop scanned up and down the barge. For the moment, things seemed to have calmed down a bit. Out of intact crates, the ammo boat fired up its engines again and looped back around to the south. “Don’t take long, fellas,” Coop said, his finger off the transmit button. As soon as the boat was clear, the bow tubes resumed fire on the eastern bridge, cutting off the flow of bodies into the river. For the moment, at least. “We didn’t get a full resupply, Sergeant Major. If we run dry, do we consider cutting anchor?”
Z-Day (Book 3): A Place For War Page 29