The Rising Horde, Volume Two (Sequel to The Gathering Dead )

by Stephen Knight

  “Hercules Six, Hercules Ops. Roger that.”

  The loudspeakers came to life. “All Rangers, cease fire. All Rangers, cease fire. Only snipers are cleared to engage at this time. Attention all civilians outside the gate, this is your final chance. Move along the wall to the rear of the camp and cross the drawbridge. You can still escape into the desert. You are standing in a kill zone. This is your final chance.”

  Several civilians heeded the command and struck out, running along the outer wall.

  But it was already too late.

  “Holy shit,” Gartrell said.

  Thousands of zombies stepped out of the flaming morass on the highway. Many didn’t make it very far, but hundreds of them weren’t so badly damaged they couldn’t still hunt. The sniper fire became more pronounced, more insistent, and zombie after zombie went down at an impressive rate. The more carnivorous corpses streamed through the wall of flame, many more than the snipers could hope to handle. Thankfully, the stenches weren’t sufficiently fleet of foot to be difficult targets, and they tripped and stumbled over the bodies of their fallen as they shambled toward the long lines of concertina wire that surrounded the camp’s outer perimeter. When they hit that, the wire slowed their advance. The necromorphs were caught up on the razor wire, and the snipers were able to engage them in a methodical and lethal fashion.

  Through his binoculars, McDaniels watched as stench after stench was dispatched with expert shots to their heads. The smoldering bodies slumped into the wire, held there by the sharp barbs. That proved to be a problem, for the rest of the zombie advance simply climbed over the motionless corpses. They climbed higher into the wire, where they were killed in turn. In a matter of minutes, the outer wire was full of dangling corpses.

  Still more zeds came, shambling, stumbling, crawling. They pulled themselves over the smoking bodies in the wire like a fetid tide. The first wire barrier sagged beneath the weight in several places, which made things easier for the zeds, but also easier for the snipers, The men were able to make pinpoint shots through the gaps, dropping every target which presented itself. Bodies dropped into growing mounds.

  And over those mounds, more ghouls crept forward.

  “Hercules Ops, Hercules Six. Let’s get some gunships over the eastern wire. I want the Apaches to use their chainguns to take some of the heat off the snipers. Get the Special Forces and SEAL sniper teams set up, too. The stenches are going to overwhelm the wire. We’ll need them to get in on the action. Over.”

  “Hercules Six, Hercules Ops. Roger all.”

  “How long will it take them to get through the wire barriers?” Jaworski asked.

  “Not long,” McDaniels replied.

  “Looks like we underestimated just how many of these things were going to come walking up,” Gartrell said. “We were expecting thousands, but it’s looking more like we’re going to get millions.” He looked at the floodlights illuminating the kill zones. “I guess the kill zones were a great idea, but once those things get through the perimeter defenses and through the trenches, they’re going to fill up the zones quicker than we can get rid of the bodies. In a few days, a week maybe, the bodies will be piled higher than the walls.”

  “Let’s see if we can’t change that.” Jaworski spoke into his headset. “Hercules Ops, this is Leonidas. Contact WILD FIRE and confirm they have incendiaries only. If so, I want them to set up inside Phase Line Sahara and move from south to north. Over.”

  “Leonidas, Hercules Ops. Roger that, stand by. Over.”

  “It’s going to feel like they’re hitting the camp, but they’re not,” Jaworski said. “The rounds will be hitting eight hundred meters out, but still plenty close enough to fry everything between Phase Line Canyon and the highway.”

  “We need to pull back off the wall?” McDaniels asked.

  Jaworski shook his head. “Negative, we’ll be fine.”

  “Leonidas, this is Hercules Ops. Over.”

  “Ops, this is Leonidas. Go ahead. Over.”

  “Leonidas, Hercules Ops. WILD FIRE confirms payload to be incendiary weapons only and is orienting the attack per your instructions. Flight of four bravo five twos inbound and on-station in six minutes. Over.”

  “Roger that, Ops. Leonidas out.” Jaworski turned to McDaniels. “This should be—”

  Gartrell cut him off. “They’re breaking through! They’re breaking through!”

  McDaniels turned back to the battlefield. A huge mass of zeds had surged against the outer wire. Within seconds, the horde swarmed over the perimeter and swelled against the second line of concertina wire. As before, dozens of corpses got hung up in the wire, but they served as stepping stones for the mass of necromorphs behind them. McDaniels unslung his rifle and pulled the buttstock against his shoulder as the sniper fire increased. It didn’t matter. There were thousands of zeds rushing the camp, and he knew why. They had seen the civilians outside the gate, illuminated by the floodlights.

  The necromorphs were coming for dinner.

  The thunder of rotorbeats clattered nearby, followed momentarily by the bang-bang-bang of chainguns as the AH-64D Apache Longbows arrived. The thirty-millimeter rounds slashed through the surging zombies, blasting several to bits and pieces. It wasn’t enough. The horde rolled up against the third layer of concertina wire, and the weight of the writhing bodies made it bow inward.

  “Coming through, Colonel!” McDaniels was unceremoniously jostled by a pair of SEALs as they pushed their way into the sandbagged revetment. Within seconds, the SEALs set up a big Barrett M82A1 sniper rifle, a weapon that fired fifty-caliber rounds.

  McDaniels pushed the slack-jawed Jaworski to his left as the Air Force officer continued to survey the scene through his binoculars. It was obvious he couldn’t quite get his head wrapped around the latest events. McDaniels sympathized. Up until then, the closest Jaworski had ever come to seeing the gathering dead in action was through satellite and drone surveillance feeds. Watching an attack go down firsthand was something completely different.

  “Move to your left, sir. The SEALs need to set up here!”

  Jaworski dropped the binoculars from his eyes and did as McDaniels said without comment. As soon as he and Gartrell had moved a few feet to their left and made enough space for the SEALs to get set up, Jaworski raised the glasses again. He maintained the pose even as the SEAL manning the big Barrett opened up, blasting zeds into two pieces with the powerful weapon.

  The civilians at the gate rabbited, but it was too late. The zeds were everywhere, despite the withering attack from the helicopters and the precision fire from scores of snipers. The last line of concertina wire that separated the civilians from the horde finally gave way beneath the weight of the thousands of corpses pressed against it.

  “Hercules Ops, Hercules Six. Rangers are good to engage all zeds outside Gate One!” McDaniels said. “Try and keep them off the civvies. Over!”

  “Roger, Hercules Si—” The rest of the reply was drowned out by the sudden thunder of hundreds of assault rifles opening up in a staccato thunder.

  McDaniels shouldered his rifle and peered through the night vision scope. He added his own fire to the fray, taking down every zed he could. Through the scope, he saw zeds falling from multiple hits. There was no way to ensure a target wasn’t serviced by several weapons at the same time. He kept his attention on the civilians, dropping the swarming zeds as quickly as possible. The SEAL manning the Barrett beside him had given up on precision fire, and he simply ventilated every corpse he sighted on, depending on the Barrett’s heavy rounds to inflict enough damage.

  McDaniels caught a glimpse of a toddler being torn from its mother’s arms by one carnivorous ghoul. He immediately pulled the trigger and sent a round through the stench’s head, but not before it took a bite out of the child’s arm. They both went down, and the child’s mother threw herself on top of the toddler. Both were lost beneath a pile of struggling necromorphs. McDaniels fired into the pile three times. He knew the rounds wou
ldn’t even inconvenience the zombies, but he hoped they would pass through the wall of necrotic flesh and take the lives of the living beneath.

  “Rangers, keep the stenches from the civilians!” Gartrell shouted. “Keep the heat on! Keep the heat on!” A chorus of hooahs responded over the thunder of rifle fire, but it was already a lost cause. Another wave of zombies broke through the sagging fence and rolled over the defenseless citizens. Even with his radio headset and the hearing protectors underneath, McDaniels was still almost dazed by the din of the constant firing. But he wouldn’t have had it any other way. The noise conspired to drown out the screams of the helpless civilians outside the gate as they were torn limb from limb in the night by blackened, smoking corpses that had survived flame and gunfire to feed.

  It’s a scene from hell, he thought as he peered through his rifle’s scope and dropped another target. How are we supposed to get through this?

  Above the racket, he heard a voice in his headset. “Hercules Six, Hercules Ops. WILD FIRE on station, payload on its way. Over.”

  “Roger,” McDaniels said.

  The night turned into day.

  Great explosions of fire and fury erupted in the desert, so bright a violet that they made the flaming morass of traffic appear to be nothing more than a spark that wouldn’t catch. Shadows grew long as tremendous ribbons of flame uncoiled in the night like demonic serpents, reaching out and consuming everything the landscape had to offer. Ten thousand zombies ceased to exist beneath the incendiary onslaught, turned into mere memory in the blink of an eye.

  The noise was overwhelming. The bombs were landing well outside the compromised wire fences, but soldiers still ducked behind their sandbagged revetments. McDaniels flinched away from the attack as well. Jaworski had been right. It did feel as if the bombs were hitting the camp. As he straightened, he noticed that Jaworski hadn’t moved a muscle. The man kept his binoculars trained on the carnage where the civilians had been taken down by the horde. The gunfire had become sporadic for a few moments as the first of the incendiary explosives went off, but it picked up again. The zeds were serviced with methodical regularity, and within a minute, the horde outside the gate had been decimated.

  More bombs exploded in the desert and another curtain of fire blazed. McDaniels slung his rifle and raised his binoculars. He saw no indication of any further zombie activity. Even the walking dead couldn’t traipse through that kind of maelstrom. He dropped his view to the gate. The civilians had been slaughtered, but from beneath a pile of bodies, a small figure emerged. A young girl. Her jeans and Dora the Explorer T-shirt were covered with blood and dark ichor. Her right arm was gone. She turned toward the camp, and dull, lifeless eyes peered out from her bloodied face. The new zombie regarded the gore-splattered gate, and moaned.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Jaworski said. McDaniels looked over and saw the Air Force colonel had his binoculars trained on the girl zombie as well.

  “He’s not here, sir,” Gartrell offered.

  A gunshot rang out, and the dead girl fell.

  Jaworski finally lowered his binoculars, but did not turn away from the battlefield. Another round of bombs landed, illuminating his features in flashes of orange-white light. McDaniels saw that Jaworski had the thousand-yard stare.

  “They won’t be getting through that in this direction for a few hours,” Jaworski said slowly. “Let’s get those fences repaired. And let’s get the dead bodies tossed into one of the trenches. Make sure there’s enough firepower on overwatch to keep the soldiers and engineers secure while they work.” With that, Jaworski turned and left the wall.

  McDaniels and Gartrell watched him go, then exchanged glances.

  Gartrell shrugged after a moment. “I’m going to take another walk down the line, see how the troops are holding up. Unless you want me to see to the cleanup detail?”

  “Negative, Sarmajor. See to the men. I’ll take care of that.” McDaniels passed the word back to Operations, and informed the operator that he would meet the cleanup detail at the inner gate.

  The dead were coming, and in alarming numbers. They had to get the perimeter squared away and ready because the main event was just around the corner.

  6

  Stanislaw Jaworski walked into the Tactical Operations Center and went directly to his work area. Captain Chase acknowledged his presence with a salute that went unreturned. The Air Force colonel sat heavily in his chair and switched on his workstation. As it booted up, he pulled a thick plastic binder toward him. It was marked CLOSE AIR OPERATIONS, and the thick volume contained the entire air-support battle plan he had come up with to keep SPARTA alive and functional for the next several months. When he’d pulled it together, Jaworski hadn’t kidded himself. He knew that the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who made up Joint Task Force SPARTA would come into direct contact with the zeds. He knew that upwards of a million of the walking dead would eventually arrive outside the camp’s defenses, and that Odessa and every civilian establishment in the area would fall before the onslaught. There was no way to prevent that. And he had known—intellectually, anyway—that a good number of those same civilians would seek shelter inside the camp.

  Jaworski had gone over that time and time again with his superiors operating out of MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. JTF SPARTA was to offer assistance wherever possible, but the task force’s ultimate mission was not to support civilian sustainment operations. The mission was to ensure research and manufacture of the anti-zombie drug was carried out, and that the product was distributed. While there were hundreds of thousands of civilians in the area surrounding SPARTA, hundreds of millions more in the nation needed the drug. Colonel Stanislaw Jaworski had to consider that his entire reason for being. Jaworski had accepted that mission, embraced it. He knew he had what it took to see it through.

  Or he thought he had. Then, he’d watched the civilians at the gate be devoured by an unstoppable enemy that could walk through chemically-fueled infernos and ignore utterly devastating aerial bombardments that would drive any other enemy utterly insane with fear. Only well-placed bullets had finally stopped them and brought an end to the necromorphs’ cycle of feeding.

  The final realization of what it took—what it really took—left Jaworski more than a little unhinged. No bombardment, no indirect weapon system, and no automatic weapon could have kept those people alive. Once the necromorphs saw them, the zeds were willing to sacrifice anything—anything!—in order to feed. They knew no fear, respected no penalty, and recognized no enemy. The only way to stop them from feeding was to shoot them through the head, or otherwise cause them substantial brain trauma.

  Jaworski had thought he got it. But he was wrong. And when he finally did get it, he realized the task force was a lost cause. Nothing in America’s arsenal, short of nuclear weapons, could decimate the necromorph force heading toward SPARTA. Even B-52 strikes could only delay it. The stenches would surround SPARTA, wear down its defenders, and eventually defeat its defenses and swarm the camp, eating every person they could find. No matter how hardened the perimeter, how reinforced the buildings, or how skilled the special operations forces, the necromorphs had mass and numbers on their side. The only way SPARTA might have survived was if the entire facility had been relocated underground.

  That final realization wasn’t what had left Stanislaw Jaworski devastated. When he had seen the little girl emerge from the pile of dead—the humanity bled from her, her eyes filled with only an inescapable hunger—he knew he was in charge of a fool’s errand.

  And he wasn’t going to have any of that.

  Jaworski went through the binder and compared it to the electronic version stored in the TOC’s servers. He ensured that every call sign, every aircraft type, every munition, every point of contact was correct and easily found in both places. He then went through all the status reports his staff had delivered to him over the weeks. They had been collected into a single file on the servers and a single volume in another black binder. The culminations o
f the reports had been distilled into a final breakdown of consumables: how many bullets, beans, and beds the task force had available. While the reports were so dry than even an actuary’s heart wouldn’t likely go aflutter while reading them, the information they contained was of dire importance. Those in charge of SPARTA would need to know how long they could expect to maintain, presuming the outer defenses held. As it stood, if they were not resupplied again after today, SPARTA might expect to live for another year at its current operational tempo. Of course, there was no guarantee the tempo of operations wouldn’t increase, and Jaworski rather thought that was a given. There were just too many stenches out there, and the camp was probably the last living morsel available to them for hundreds of miles. So it made sense that the zombies would choose to try their luck against SPARTA’s defenses. As far as they were concerned, the floodlights illuminating the kill zone were flashing neon signs that read Eat At Joe’s.

  When he was convinced that everything was accounted for and that all the operational orders were complete and located in multiple places, Jaworski pulled a piece of paper toward him and wrote a quick note. He then folded the paper in thirds and taped it shut. He wrote TO LTC McDANIELS on it, placed it between the keys on his workstation’s keyboard, then got up and headed for the TOC’s door.

  “Colonel?” Captain Chase asked. “Sir, we have another flight of B-52s en route. They’ll be on-station in forty minutes or so. We also have F-15Es rotating in and out, but they don’t have full complements of incend—”

  “We’ll cover that later, Captain. Have the attack jets concentrate their runs outside Phase Line Sahara. Keep the heat on the stenches. Even normal high explosives will kill a dozen or so right off the bat, and severely damage another dozen so badly that they’ll be less of a threat.”